Walkabout
by Negative Creep
Summary: Relm and Interceptor go on a coming of age journey across a post Kefka world. Winner of the 2006 IcyBrian All That Glitters competition, I'm ... very surprised to say. Complete.
1. Chapter 1

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Walkabout

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**Chapter I**

_

---

They have been travelling for months, a harum-scarum flight across the plains that seems to follow no prepared path or chartered route. Sometimes she avoids the towns, sometimes she doesn't, and since Interceptor is only a dog he can never tell which option his mistress will choose on that particular day. He hates the cities; crowds make him nervous and the overwhelming sights and smells assault his keen senses like physical blows, painful and harsh to canine ears and nostrils and even the pads of his paws. It doesn't matter, though. If she chose a road leading straight to the mouth of Hell itself the dog would follow, because the girl is his godhead and without her there is nothing. He has braved fire and smoke for her in the past and before their journey is over he will probably risk more with the unflinching loyalty and courage of his breed._

_Interceptor doesn't know why they're wandering or where it will end, but he has been through this all before, long, long ago, and so he follows Relm into the wilderness without a moment's hesitation._

---

  


The rain had been coming down in buckets for days, a pug-strangler of a deluge that turned creeks into flooded brown torrents of debris-swirling whitewater and lowland into boggy mires. If it hadn't been for the abandoned chocobo-herder's shack Relm hadlocated shortly before the storm broke she would have been soaked completely through within moments of the first thunderclap; as it was the girl had merely gotten damp, just enough to make her irritable and uncomfortable as she sat staring moodily out the door of the hovel. It wasn't much of a shelter – four walls constructed of splintery boards with gaps in-between big enough to shove your fist through, a piece of corrugated tin stuck precariously atop them for a roof – and as such leaked something terrible; there was a persistent drip that kept tapping Relm on the head every few minutes, and it was making her already sour mood worse with each drop that splashed the top of her brow. She had taken to counting the number of seconds between driblets to alleviate boredom, waiting with a perverse fascination for the next one to strike.

_One …_

_Two …_

_Three …_

A sudden wetness slid down her temple and traced its way to her jawline, dripping slowly from there into the hollow between neck and collar.

Damn. That one had been early, and off-centre to boot. Leaks were tricky little bastards.

There was no use moving to another spot, though, as the 'ceiling' was so permeated with holes you were likely to get splashed no matter where you placed yourself. So Relm sat in the doorway and sulked, pointed chin in the palm of one hand, waiting for the rain to let up so she could continue on her journey. The longer she had to wait the nastier her mood became, until the girl was nearly fuming with impotent rage. She hated getting wet. She hated not being able to move onwards during daylight hours. She hated herself for starting on this stupid fucking journey, and she hated the absentee father who had inspired her to leave Thamasa in the first place.

Most of all she hated_ rain._ It had rained the morning of Strago's funeral as well, just to add insult to injury. As far as Relm was concerned the weather and everything associated with it could get stuffed if it was going to behave _that_ way, bringing back old memories and getting her all wet and cold and and and …

Another droplet trailed down her face and she wiped it away impatiently with the back of one hand. Crying was for weak sissies who played with dolls and teacups, not the descendants of mages. A lot of people had cried at the funeral – hell, Relm even thought she'd seen big burly Sabin dabbing away at his eyes like a doily-arranging old maid once during the service – but not her. Not even when they lowered the coffin into the ground, not even when the party returned to the big empty house Strago had raised her in. She could've been a stunt double for pre-Returners Celes, all the emotion she had shown. People seemed baffled by this; they kept asking _are you alright? _and _how are you feeling? _until Relm felt like she might scream and ran off through the storm to Eboshi's Rock, hiding there till night fell and she returned to sheepishly drip water on the villa's clean floor. Terra, ever the mother hen, had merely clucked her tongue and dried the girl off thoroughly with a towel, gently admonishing her with threats of the cold she was sure to catch after this escapade. The older woman had a good-natured way of scolding that wasn't _really _scolding, and so Relm had made no protest about all the fuss. After all, Terra had dealt with so many orphans over the past four years that she must know what was best, right?

… Well, Relm had thought so until she heard the words _still too young to be on her own _and _better come back with me _being bandied about, anyway. Then she decided that Terra could go fuck herself. Nothing personal, of course, but there was no way she was going to that damned orphanage when she could take perfectly good care of herself. Most of the world's worst monsters had died along with its magic, and Interceptor could easily protect the girl from any human intruders that might come knocking. He was as bad as any nanny, always trailing Relm's footsteps wherever she went, even that bad day on Eboshi Rock when the sea was a churning mass of foam and the rain came down sideways in sheets. No one else had followed – maybe they had understood her need for solitude, or maybe they just didn't want to get wet running after a brat like her – but Interceptor had been there, a quietly reassuring force that hadn't asked questions or said anything at all. Animals were better friends than people; Relm had always thought so, and that day on the Rock had just cemented the idea in her stubborn mind.

He was curled up against her back right now, a huge black ball of fur protected from the wet weather by an outer coat of long ebony guard hairs and downy-soft grey wool underneath. Relm envied him greatly but harboured no resentment towards her faithful companion; she could get mad at everybody else in this stupid world, but Interceptor was her best friend, and towards her friends she harboured an almost obsessive amount of loyalty._Too bad that loyalty wasn't reciprocated _she thought to herself, rather bitterly. How _dare _Terra try to bundle her off like some orphaned toddler.The nerve! The fucking _nerve _of it all! Rage overtook her like a wave and she swore softly to herself there in the shack, remembering the pain of the betrayal as if it were happening all over again.

Interceptor raised his head at the curse and pricked both ears forward, sensing his young mistress's anger even without seeing her face. A soft _whuf _was given in query; hearing it, Relm calmed and placed a reassuring hand on the dog's back, stroking the silky-soft pelt until her fury subsided and her head was clear and calm once more.

"It's okay, puppy. Everything's alright."

The dog, satisfied that nothing was amiss, tucked his muzzle into his tail and returned to dozing. Relm sighed restlessly and continued to stare into the rain.

---

_It will be a long journey, so Relm takes only the essential things – paint, brushes, as much dried meat as she can carry, a fat sack of gold pieces her grandfather left her when he died, and her most prized possession, a ring that had once belonged to her mother. As much as it pains her to do so she will have to leave most of her clothing behind – almost all of it is red, and the last thing the fugitive girl wants to do is stand out like a bleeding thumb. In the town of Mobliz they sell thick woollen cloaks, dyed a dull brown to blend in with the vegetation of the Veldt across the channel; the people of the little village have made a brisk trade recently selling them to hunters headed north on safari. Relm wrinkles her nose in disgust thinking of the plain garments, but sets aside the crimson garb with a long-suffering sigh after a moment's hesitation. Sacrifices will have to be made if she is to accomplish her goal, and this is but the first._

_Interceptor has been watching all of these preparations from the corner, yellow eyes tracking every subtle movement the girl makes. He is aware that something will happen soon; there is a tension in the air, a smell of change that disturbs the dog immensely. Dogs and especially wolves are creatures of habit, and any break in the routine of their daily life is at best a worrisome bother and at worst cause for high alarm. Interceptor has an especially sensitive disposition, and so he has been on-edge ever since Relm's mood changed, the day she opened a sealed letter written in Strago's messy, looping script._

_That was days ago, and what she read in the letter only strengthened her determination to leave, giving it a purpose and a cause. The half-overheard whispered conversation between Terra and Edgar Figaro was the initial nudge; what the letter told her merely gave her a way out, along with a million angry questions and a hurt sense of confusion she had thought buried long ago. Relm will have her answers, if she has to go around the world three times to get them. He's out there, somewhere, and she will find him._**  
**_  
She finishes her preparation and slings the hide pack over her shoulders, testing its weight and heft. It is heavy but not unwieldy; satisfied, Relm opens her window and prepares to slip away into the night, before any of the others awaken and try to put a stop to her flight. The road out of Thamasa winds away before her like a dark ribbon, leading to the nearby port and a ferry bound for Mobliz. There never used to be much traffic between the two towns – or any traffic in Thamasa at all for that matter, xenophobic backwater that it once was – but things have changed much in the three years since Kefka's defeat. All things must change in this new world, or fall by the wayside to be lost and forgotten forever._

_Interceptor has lifted his head from his massive paws by this time and is whining softly, eyes filled with concern. Relm can barely stand to look at him; she has long since decided not to take the dog along, telling herself there are far too many dangers out there for her half-feral pal – hunters with loaded guns and itchy trigger-fingers, the risk of being lost or separated from one another - and so now she imagines accusations and betrayal in every glance he gives her. She kneels and throws her pipe-cleaner arms around her friend's huge neck, hugging him tightly for several seconds while desperately trying to keep her composure. Then the girl stands and gives him one final command:_

_"Interceptor, stay. Stay**." **_

_And with those words she is gone, sliding over the windowsill and into the darkness with an ease that would do her old man proud. She gently latches the window once outside and without a backward glance slips down the road, dashing from shadow to shadow on swift, nimble legs. Very soon Relm is out of sight of the villa, leaving no sign of where she has gone to any human who might care to search._

_But Interceptor is no human …_

_He has both forefeet on the windowsill by this point, the whining in his chest growing louder and louder as Relm disappears further into the night. When she finally vanishes from his view, the command – STAY – slips completely from the wolf-dog's mind, and the only thing he can think of is catching up before the girl leaves him behind forever. His last master did much the same, as did the woman before that, the one the girl reminds him so much of. He will not let this happen again even if it means disobeying a direct order, a grave crime indeed to Interceptor's honest soul._

_The latch will not give way, not even under one hundred and twenty pounds of wolf-muscle and scrabbling claws. The situation becomes more and more desperate. He tries the door; although it shakes and splinters under the dog's frantic assault, the oaken panels hold fast. There are stirrings from the other rooms as the house becomes roused by all this noise, and Interceptor senses he has precious little time left in which to act. One route alone is left to freedom._

_He turns back towards the bay window, lowers his head, and charges. _

_There is a sound of splintering, shivering glass, a dull thump on the grass outside, and then silence. Before his feet have fairly touched earth Interceptor is off with his nose to the ground, tracking the girl he worships into the night._


	2. II

_II_

The world was a different place in these post-Empire, post-Kefka days. Over a thousand years had passed since the War of the Magi, and in that time the continents and their peoples had made alliances, split into warring factions, rejoined, and generally done all the things that civilizations tend to do. Even the shifting of the very earth itself hadn't stopped people from living their lives as best they could, and now, almost four years on, you could hardly tell there _had _been a cataclysmic shaking of the world's foundations, but for one massive change – things had become astonishingly (and some might have said gratingly) peaceful.

There had been times of peace in the past, true, but those had merely been momentary lulls between wars or monster attacks, brief reprieves before a steady succession of storms. _This_, on the other hand, was the peace to end all peaces. The land was lusher and greener than it had ever been in living memory, the monsters had all but died out, and the remaining human population was scattered far and wide across the globe, exploring areas never before seen by the eyes of men. Previously regents and wealthy landowners had controlled the best farms and the finest pastures, but the reshaping of the world meant a drop in numbers across all income brackets. Soon there was a surplus of rich land up for grabs to whoever would cultivate it, and many left their homes in the wrecked cities to raise crops or try their hand at ranching. Rural hamlets that had numbered perhaps a hundred strong exploded overnight into bustling villages full of commerce and trade, and farms sprang up like weeds in places once haunted only by monsters and other beasts of the wild. For the first time in its history the world was becoming thoroughly civilized.

Relm wasn't sure she liked it at all. The girl had grown up in an isolated community where most people knew their neighbors by name, and then all at once in the past few years it had become populated by strangers looking for a new and better life in the fishing trade. At the same time, many of the older citizens had succumbed to disease or old age, until Relm could walk through the marketplace and not see one face she recognized in the bustling crowds of fishwives and bakers. The city of mages had quite suddenly turned into the city of mariners, and Relm hated this new change with a burning passion.

She had thought leaving on this new adventure would placate her wounded sensibilities somewhat – after all, there _had_ to be places not yet choked and clogged with people, where only the wild remained – but so far it wasn't working. There were even ranches on the Veldt now, and the sight of the fenceposts and cabins dotting what had once been a major monster migratory path lodged in the girl's stomach like a large, heavy, and mostly indigestible brick. Was there anywhere they _wouldn't _fucking settle?

Four years before, a child wouldn't have lasted five seconds unattended on these plains, unless perhaps they had sported a mane of shaggy green hair and an incredible will to live. Now there were several at every homestead, usually playing tag in the front yard until they spotted the stranger and her dog passing by and ceased all activities to stare with the uninhibited boldness of the very young. Kefka's defeat had caused an unprecedented baby boom all those years ago; with the rich and plentiful crops that were sure to spring from the now-fertile soil to feed these new mouths it didn't look like it would be ending any time soon. Relm sighed and picked up her pace, wanting to get away from their prying eyes and prying questions.

"Hey lady, where ya goin'? Ain't nothin' that way but the haunted castle."

"What's your dog's name? Didja just come over on the boat from Mobliz? Is the confec-confec—is the candy store still open there?"

"Are you a 'vagabond'? My daddy says there are lots of vagabonds around now, and that I'm not s'pposed to talk to them."

One rosy-cheeked urchin hanging monkey-like from the planks of the fence reached a hand through the slats to touch Interceptor as he trotted by. Relm's voice stopped the outstretched digits before they got even halfway to their destination.

"Leave him alone. The dog eats little boys."

The sticky hand was retracted with a swiftness. Widened eyes tracked the pair as they quietly passed the edge of the farm and became nothing more than specks on the horizon, shapes dissolving into obscurity on the vastness of the Veldt. The two would be discussed and analyzed by the children for a good five days after, most of them coming to the conclusion that the girl and her dog, if not the mysterious 'vagrants' and obviously not monsters, must be wandering espers. Then the adults told them all the espers were dead, as they had told them a thousand times before, and feeling very silly for believing in such stories the boys and girls turned their interests towards vampire chocobos instead.

---

Thankfully for Relm (or thankfully for any settlers Relm might have come in contact with), the land began to grow wilder and emptier the farther north she pressed. They would get there eventually, she had no doubt of that, but for now the only company she and Interceptor had were the birds and beasts of the plains and the wind, which never ceased blowing out here on the treeless wastes. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but gently rippling grass, stretching like a green-gold ocean from horizon to horizon in unbroken waves that fluttered when the breeze swept through. Occasionally a leafer would bolt almost under their feet and race for cover; Interceptor would chase the creature with long, loping strides of his own for a ways and then angle back towards his mistress, never straying far from her side for too long.

Much of the day passed like this, Relm making her way as best she could through the calf-high grass while Interceptor idled along just ahead or behind her. The girl's mood had improved greatly since leaving the last outposts of civilization behind, and so she took her time travelling through this stretch of the world, whistling an old Jidoor bawdy-house tune Setzer had been fond of (Strago less so), while occasionally kicking at discarded cocatolis nests and other assorted debris with her big clunky boots. She was inordinately proud of her boots; they had been bought for her years and years ago from a seller in Albrook who had disappeared along with a great many others when the World of Balance was destroyed by Kefka. The shoemaker might have been long gone, but Relm's fancy red footwear remained, an enduring testament to the cobbler's great skill, Celes's deep pockets, and Relm's vanity for bright and shiny objects, especially those she could wear. Many pieces of overly-bright clothing had been left behind in Thamasa, but the thought of leaving her 'god-killing boots' had nearly driven Relm into a frenzy. You had to have a _little _style, as her 'uncles' Setzer and Edgar had often said.

The sun began to sink lower in the west, a massive red ball teetering precariously just above the grassy horizon. It looked as if it would set the entire prairie aflame were it ever to brush that golden sward, and in a way it did, brilliant pinks and fiery oranges leaping up to make an eye-watering conflagration out of the sky and every cloud in it. Grass-stems and rocky outcroppings threw long shadows in the coppery light; Relm's shadow made her look at least seven feet tall and as menacing as a cutthroat mercenary. The effect was rather spoiled when the assassin began to sing about what a wonderful pair of boots she owned, and even more so when the bloodthirsty wolf following close behind started howling mournfully in time with the sound of her voice.

She had just begun on the seventh verse – a paean to how shiny and candy-red they were, and how men from miles around would come just to polish them – and the sky was going from orange-pink to deep purple when Interceptor suddenly stopped howling and began to scent the cooling air, ears flicking this way and that to catch sounds Relm couldn't hear even when she reluctantly stopped her song and strained to listen for them. The big dog began to growl low and menacingly in his throat, shifting in a complete circle to keep tabs on whatever-it-was he thought was trailing them in the long grass outside of Relm's eyesight.

Something was out there. Interceptor could hear it rustling as it circled and even occasionally got a whiff of its scent when the breeze blew right – a human – but his weak eyes could not pin the intruder down, nor was the wind in his favour. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to rush into the weeds and sink his fangs into its back, but that would have meant leaving the girl unguarded, and that was the one thing Interceptor would not do. The grasses directly in front of them began to part and he threw himself against her knees, snarling and raging in a way that would have stopped most trespassers in their tracks. Not so with this one. It just kept coming and both travelers prepared to attack, Relm reaching for her paintbrush as Interceptor crouched at her feet and prepared to spring, raised hackles making him look absolutely monstrous in the waning half-light.

The interloper appeared like the Stray Cat Relm's grandfather used to tell her stories of when she was a tiny girl – first came the grin, and then the rest followed after. The rest in this case was a long, lean body and a mass of shaggy green hair that seemed to make its owner look much more substantial than he actually was. Golden eyes glinted mischievously at Relm from under the verdant mane, coy and affectionate and the slightest bit dangerous.

"You're a long way from home, aren't you, Relmie?"

Both Relm's jaw and her paintbrush dropped, the latter clattering to the ground unnoticed.

"… _Gau?"_

_---_

_  
_

Among the Returners – that little band of adventurers who had saved the world and coalesced into something more-or-less resembling a slightly dysfunctional family group along the way – it was pretty much agreed that Relm and Gau should have been the best of friends from the moment they'd laid eyes on one another. Both were around the same age, both loved animals with a passion, and both were (in the opinions of Mssrs Garamonde and Magus) entirely too precocious for their own good.

This was _not _how things had worked out at all. Relm was fascinated by the life Gau had led before his rescue, but completely and utterly exasperated by the boy himself. She tried several times along their journey to strike up conversations and once even attempted to paint his portrait, but Gau never sat still long enough to be asked questions and the portrait-painting session had proven a complete and utter disaster. Relm left the room for two minutes to fetch an extra brush and returned to find most of the paint squirted liberally across the floor and canvas, not to mention all over Gau himself.

That was the first and last time Relm ever saw a rainbow-coloured smile. It was also the final straw that broke the girl's already tenuous patience; from then on she gave Gau a wide berth and paid no more attention to him than she would have an annoying toddler. He was interesting, and Relm liked interesting people, but her tolerance and her temper were notoriously thin and he seemed to delight in giving his younger companion a hard time whenever possible. Their relationship was strained from beginning to end, and when the party split to go its separate ways after Kefka's defeat, the two had no more dealings with one another. Relm heard from Edgar or Terra occasionally about how he was doing – Cyan had taken it upon himself to see the boy had a proper education and sent him to the most expensive school in Figaro – but even that line of information dried up when Gau apparently tired of the constricting clothes and endless formalities, running away to parts unknown. At the funeral Relm asked Cyan if there had been any word from him since then; the Doman had scowled so fiercely she hadn't pushed the issue further. That was the last Relm had heard of Gau and she figured it might be the last she _ever _heard about him, knowing his solitary nature.

Yet here he was not a bare foot in front of her with that shit-eating grin plastered all over his face, evidently pleased as punch at having scared Relm nearly out of her wits. It had been three years since the last time she'd seen him, and General Leo himself rising out of the damned ground wouldn't have left her as speechless as this spectre of the past popping up in the middle of nowhere. He was much taller and older than she remembered (obviously, it had been three goddamned years), but there was no-one else on the planet with such an irritating cat's grin, and most _definitely_ nobody else who would dare to call her 'Relmie'. It was Gau, alright.

One of the things that had annoyed Relm the most about him on their journey had been his habit of circling people whenever they tried to hold a conversation. Whatever else had changed in the intervening time, it wasn't this; the older boy had already made two laps around them and was starting on his third, slippery as an eel and as fleet-footed as any young stag of the plains. Every move Gau made seemed effortless, even when he leaned in and affectionately tweaked one of Relm's many blonde curls.

Yep. Same old Gau.

"You keep up singing like that, you'll attract every night-monster on the Veldt," he finally said, slipping behind Relm until she had to crane her head around to keep track of him. His voice was ever-so-slightly-accented and hoarse from disuse, but thankfully that stint in Figaro had taught him how to conjugate his verbs properly. "It's been awhile, hasn't it, Relmie? What are you doing out here? How did you _get_ here? You lost?"

Relm managed to find her tongue before he fired off another question, but gave up trying to look him in the face as she spoke. If he wasn't gonna stand still she wasn't gonna bother.

"… It's a long story, Gau. Wow, is _this _where you've been all this time? Do you _know_ how pissed off Cyan and Sabin have been about you? I mean, I've seen them pissed off before, when I clipped off one side of Cyan's mustache for paintbrush bristles while he was sleeping the old crab wouldn't speak to me for a _month, _but we're talking _totally_ peeved, like, steam coming out of their ears and ..."

Interceptor interrupted her babble with another low growl. He had been watching the strange human with a cocked head – the dog remembered the green-haired human from long before and never failed to become confused when confronted with his presence; why did it smell and move like a wild thing? – but from far away he had heard what sounded like a shriek. There had been not the least smell of anything dangerous since their journey had begun, but now night was falling and all his instincts told him things could change at any moment. He looked up at his mistress and whined.

Gau heard it too, stopping in his flight for several seconds to listen while shushing Relm with an uplifted finger. His entire body seemed to tense under the strain of listening, and then all at once he was back in motion, grabbing Relm by the hand before she could pull back or protest.

"C'mon. You come back with me for tonight; it's not safe to be travelling out in the open like this alone." Noticing Interceptor staring at him with some interest, he amended this last part. "…Or it's not safe for the _two_ of you to be travelling alone, that is. You might get lost or something. Come! Come come come!"

Relm opened her mouth to argue against this but Gau was already bounding off through the reedspulling her behind, and the only options were to go with him or get her arm jerked completely out of its socket. The guy was as strong as an ox and almost equally stubborn; she wasn't getting out of this without a visit. With a long-suffering sigh and a cluck to Interceptor they were off.


	3. III

_III_

It took nearly an hour of stumbling after Gau in the dark to finally arrive at his home, and by the end of the side-trek Relm was pretty sure the next threat to the world's peace would come not from insane magic-infused generals, but from mosquitoes. They swarmed up in clouds every time Gau pushed through a particularly dense stand of reeds, biting any exposed patch of flesh they could jab their pointy little suckers into. It was bad enough for Relm; she couldn't begin to imagine what the insects were doing to Gau, bare-legged and topless as always. He didn't seem to notice, and continued to drag Relm onwards without taking so much as a swipe at them. The moon was just beginning to rise above the horizon when at last they came out of the sedges and trailed up a little hill to the abandoned cabin Gau had made into his den.

It wasn't much bigger than the chocobo-herder's shed Relm and Interceptor had taken refuge in during the monsoon, a small, one-roomed shack with a fire-pit in the floor and a smoke hole in the roof that probably made things slightly uncomfortable whenever it rained. That wasn't a problem tonight, though; the evening was clear and the only thing pouring in through the opening was moonlight, silvery and so luminous it threw long shadows across the dark little room. Gau soon had a bright blaze going – Relm got the feeling he didn't bother with fire much but was making an effort for his guests anyway – and was spitting a fat leafer over the flames before she even had time to blink.

Strips of dried meat hung from the rafters, and every square inch of floorspace was covered in hides, mostly from leafers and the occasional deer or lobo. Gau loved his animal friends and had lived among the herds almost since birth, but he still took what he needed from them when it was necessary. He was a carnivore, a hunter, and in nature there was no sentimentality when it came to food.

The wild boy caught Relm studying her surroundings and grinned at her from across the fire, obviously proud of his little habitation. He waved his hands expansively.

"It's little, but it's all I need," he said finally, turning several times before settling back on his haunches to watch Relm carefully. It was a little unnerving, the way he never seemed to take his eyes off her. There was some deeper emotion in them that Relm couldn't quite pinpoint - one she didn't really _want _to pinpoint - and so after avoiding his gaze through yet another awkward moment of silence, she buried her hand in Interceptor's ruff for moral support and tried to think of something interesting to say.

"… So … uh … why'd you run away?" she said lamely, knowing the answer full well already.He pulled a horrendous face she was pretty sure Edgar had taught him and rolled his eyes in response.

"Have _you _ever been to one of those … what's word … schools? They're horrible. Made me put on clothes in _summer_." The shaggy head shook sadly as if this was the greatest travesty in all the world, an unexplained horror to rival anything Kefka or the Empire had ever pulled. "I took the clothes off, but they made me put them back on. Not even the animals wear their coats during _summer_. Stupid. So I ran away."

"Well like I said, Cyan and Sabin are _pissed_. You really hurt old man Cyan's feelings running off like that, you know. Maybe if you'd told him what was going on he would've pulled you out?"

Gau just shook his head again. "He wouldn't understand. No-one understands. I don't want to live in their cities. _This -" _and here he made a sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate the cabin, the Veldt, and everything on it "- is where I am happy, and this is where I belong, by myself. For now," he added quickly, giving Relm that same wistful look again. She pretended to be deeply engrossed in watching the leafer carcass drip fat into the fire. Gau, sensing the sudden tension, changed the subject as best he knew how.

"What 'bout you, Relmie? Why are _you _out here, anyways?" he asked, a sly look passing over his features. "You run away too, maybe? You can stay here with me, if you like. Good company," he added with a smile, leaning over to turn the rabbit-creature on its spit. "You don't turn me in to Mr. Thou and I won't turn you back in to Strago, yes?"

The silence deepened without warning. Outside crickets chirped; somewhere far away a lobo howled mournfully, causing Interceptor to shift uneasily.

"… Relmie?"

A log in the fire popped and exploded in a shower of sparks. Relm sighed.

"Strago's dead, Gau. The stupid old man decided to die not long after you ran off. I took care of him for three years, but I couldn't help him in the end, the dumbass." Her voice wavered but very quickly pulled itself back together, strong as mended steel. "There's nothing left in Thamasa for me; it's full of fishermen and strangers and they all stink. So I left. Simple as that."

There was another long pause. Gau was looking at her so sadly she wanted to stand up and yell at him, or maybe slap him hard across the mouth. _Anything _to make that hangdog expression disappear, even if it was replaced by anger. Relm didn't need anyone's pity, especially not Gau's. Something about the idea of a young man dumped by his batshit dad in the middle of nowhere to be raised by monsters pitying _her _rubbed the girl entirely the wrong way, and she scowled at him darkly, which just led to him looking even more hurt and confused. He opened his mouth to speak and then shut it several times before anything managed to come out.

"I-I sorry," he finally stammered, ineloquent with fear and shame at having brought up such an obviously painful memory to Relm. All he had wanted to do was make her comfortable and now the girl looked like she had swallowed a bad chocobo egg. "Strago was a good man. Gave me lots of meat back during our travelling." After a few moments of contemplation he timidly added, "…But are you just going to wander around forever now? You can still stay with me, if you like. It's nice out here, away from the settlers..."

For the first time since she had arrived Relm raised her eyes and stared directly at Gau. It was a look of fierce determination, but determination towards what end he couldn't even begin to figure out. Animals were _so_ much easier to decipher; it was part of why he preferred their company to humans most of the time.

"Gau, do you have _any_ idea where Shadow is?"

Worry gave way to confusion. "… Shadow? I … No, I haven't seen him since we left Kefka's Tower. Edgar might know; he always seems to know where everyone's gone to. But … why do you want to find Shadow? Do you have dealings with him?"

Relm had already switched her gaze back to the fire, chewing on her bottom lip thoughtfully. "You might say that. You've got a point about Edgar though, he knows everything about everyone. How long would it take me to get there by foot?"

The boy's forehead wrinkled in concentration. Relm could almost see the wheels turning inside that shaggy head of his. "Two months maybe, if you're fast on your feet. But you'll have to cross Doma Channel before too long, or the blizzards will catch you. Winter is coming; this is what the birds and the beasts and the air tell me. Go west, and don't stop until you see the water."

His face darkened, and he added, "And don't stop around Doma Castle. That's a bad place. Very bad. Haunted, you know." A shudder ran through him and he licked his lips involuntarily, like a cat confronted with something distasteful. Then Relm deigned to smile at him – it was a small smile, little more than a quick flash of teeth, but a smile none the less – and every other thought in Gau's head fluttered away somewhere towards the distant stars.

"Thanks, Gau. That really does help me a lot. Now … can we _please_ eat this leafer? The smell is driving me nuts."

His blinding grin returned with a vengeance. "Thought you'd never ask."

The carcass was very quickly divvied up, Gau taking the ears and stomach (according to him the best parts) while Relm grabbed a drumstick in each hand, one for her and one for Interceptor. The dog fell to gnawing on his at an impossible rate – such a little scrap of meat wouldn't last long with Interceptor - but Relm couldn't seem to keep her eyes open to take more than one or two bites. The meat tasted _really _good, if she could just … focus on lifting it to her mouth …

Gau looked up to smile at Relm, his mouth full of crispy leafer-ear, only to find her sitting bolt upright with a drumstick still poised in her hand, fast asleep. He quietly finished his portion and, still smiling slightly, rose to his feet. Within moments the leafer-leg was gently removed from her grasp and the girl was covered snugly with a deerskin; she mumbled something incoherent that sounded like "murffin mumbly-peg plurubus" as he tucked it around her, but very quickly drifted back into unconsciousness. Soon she was curled up in a tight little ball on the floor with her back pressed up to Interceptor, a peaceful smile on her lips. The wolf-dog had watched Gau carefully but made no move to stop him, satisfied with keeping a mindful eye on this strange boy for the time being.

He stood looking down at the sleeping girl for some time, a fierce longing in his eyes.

---

The warm noonday sun streaming down through the smoke-hole and directly into her face was the first indication Relm had that she'd slept entirely too late. She had no memory whatsoever of falling asleep the night before, but she must've done so, because one minute she had been eating leafer-legs and the next she was waking up on the hide-covered floor of Gau's hut with a deerskin draped over her body. Interceptor sat sphinxlike nearby, briefly wagging his tail in greeting when he saw Relm was finally awake. She lay watching smoke drift in languid curly-cues towards the ceiling for a few more moments before finally forcing herself to get up and venture outside.

Gau was nowhere to be seen. The entire prairie seemed deserted, vast and endless under a bright fall sky. It was that deep shade of blue that hurt your eyes and made you feel lost if you stared into it for too long; Relm had been trying to perfect the colour in her paints for ages to no avail. Some things, like the hue of the sky on a fall afternoon, were just too damned tricky to pin down in a single lifetime.

Relm shouldered her pack, took one last look around for Gau, and set off in what she hoped was a westerly direction. Interceptor frisked around her in the grass, happy to be up and moving once more.


	4. IV

_

IV

_

On good days Sally could get Bill to haul several loads of driftwood from the shore before it got too dark to see. On _bad_ days she'd be lucky to get him out of the stall without producing a quirt and enough foul words to scare the tentacles off a Mad Oscar.

Unfortunately this was one of the bad days.

Bill was Sally MacDonald's black chocobo, named after an equally irascible husband long-since planted in the sandy earth of the North Veldt's coastal region. The first Bill had given up and died when the Great Sundering occurred, leaving Sally to fend for herself in a wilderness few had ventured into even before the world split apart and reshifted its plates. Bill the chocobo seemed in no danger of lying down and dying unless Sally killed the buggered thing first; he enjoyed giving her conniption fits far too much for that. Right now he was planting his feet and balking in the doorway of the stable with his head feathers spread in a wide array of directions, trying to bluff his way of the day's work. The tactic might have proven successful with previous owners, but Sally wasn't his previous owner; she merely tugged harder on the reins and continued to inform Bill of the many, many different ways you could roast a bird of his size and stature.

"Don't you puff that crest out with me, sir," she muttered, giving his backside another unsuccessful whack with the crop that got her nothing but a dirty look. "I know you, you're nothing but talk and guff, and whatever talk and guff you got in you, I've got _more. _Move your backside, buster."

The chocobo merely gave her another cold glare and dug his claws in deeper, obviously preparing for a battle. Sally was just about ready to head back to the house and get a torch to light underneath his tail feathers when a speck on the far horizon caught her eye and distracted her attention from stubborn Bill and his imminent murder.

Visitors rarely if ever came this far north, and Sally liked it that way just fine. More and more settlers had been arriving in the south with each passing year since Kefka's defeat and she knew it was only a matter of time before they began appearing in her neck of the woods, but for now the north coast was a solitary and lonely place, where buffalax and wild chocobo herds still roamed unfettered and undisturbed. Sally and her husband had left the civilized world years and years ago to live by themselves in the wilderness, and even now, when magic had disappeared from the world and she was approaching middle age, Sally felt they had made the right choice. The strange thrill of never knowing if a monster was about to attack was gone, this was true, but that made the Veldt no less exciting and wondrous to her. It got dull sometimes but it was still beautiful, the strange landscape Sally dwelled in; one simply had to wake up at dawn and step outside to learn _that_ much.

She hoped this black dot crawling along the horizon wasn't a sign of things to come. If the settlers got too thick she could always pack up her meagre belongings and leave, but when you had a husband planted nearby and had lived in a place as long as Sally had the North Coast, you kinda got attached. A strand of dark brown hair fell down in her eyes, and she pushed it back with an impatient hand, straining to see who could possibly be fluttering around this far north of the settled country. Sometimes Gau wandered up and a conversation with Gau was always a delight, but the speck didn't move like him nor was it his time of year to be travelling. Fall was quickly descending into marrow-freezing winter, and every clever animal on the plains would be gathering food and nest materials for the long, cold season ahead. It was what Sally had been doing before Bill decided to act an arse and balk that morning; he had already puffed up under the girth and thrown a saddle when the speck showed up and shook his mistress's plans all out of whack.

As it got closer the mysterious shape resolved itself into _two _dots, blurry and indistinct against the broad line of the horizon. The nearer they got the more details Sally could pick out, and the more details she could pick out the more baffled she became. Settlers had been known to wander too far north and miss their crossing at the Nikeah Channel, but if these were settlers she would eat her floppy-brimmed fedora. One looked almost like a _kid_, but what in heaven's name was a kid doing wandering this lonely country, with winter almost here no less? It was a puzzle, and the only thing Sally loved more than her independence was a good puzzle. She stepped out of the stable door and waited impatiently for the shapes to get closer, shading her brow against the morning sun's rays.

It _was _a kid. Not just a kid, but a pint-sized girl who couldn't have been much older than ten or twelve, the cutest little curly-headed thing you'd ever laid eyes on. Her clothes had been nice and of a good make at one time, that was obvious, but they were dirty and ragged now; the girl must've been travelling for some months before she bumbled her way up here. A massive black shape paced at her side, too big to be a dog but not quite large enough for one of the Veldt lobos that sometimes wandered nearby. A hybrid, maybe? Sally shook her head in disbelief. This just got better and better, didn't it?

The girl and her companion soon reached the rail-fence that marked the edge of Sally's front yard and paused, as halting and suspicious as two wild beasts. Figuring now was as good a time as any to step out and introduce herself, she adjusted her hat and stepped out of the stable, making sure to pull the latch behind as she did so. Bill would take any opportunity to run off and it'd be just her luck to have to waste half a day chasing the damned critter because an interesting hobo had plopped down in front of the cabin.

"Howdy there," she said, watching with some amusement as both girl and dog very nearly leapt into the air at the sound of her voice. "You're a fair far way from Nikeah if that's where you were headed, sugar. About 300 miles too far north, in fact, if I don't miss my mark. Did you get separated from a caravan or something?"

The wolf-cross raised its hackles and the girl eyed her somewhat suspiciously, but after a moment's pause she consented to reply.

"Is Doma Channel anywhere nearby? I need to get across soon and I was hoping that was it." She pointed a boot-clad toe at the stretch of silver water on the horizon, and Sally had a hard time stifling the laughter that threatened to burst forth from her chest at such a silly notion. The poor lamb couldn't find her way out of a whiskey barrel if she was _that _mixed up.

"No, dearie, that's Triangle Sound and you've overshot your destination by more like 400 miles in that case. Couldn't you tell you weren't going true west when the sun started sinking down by your shoulder instead of in front of your face?" Seeing the despair on the girl's face she softened her tone a touch and tried to be more understanding. "But it _has _been overcast for a good chunk of the fall, and I suppose without a compass even _I _might get mixed up in my directions now and again."

That was, in fact, exactly what had happened to Relm. After she had left Gau on that bright fall morning nearly a month before, the sky had gotten dark and the clouds had lowered and she and Interceptor had been wandering around aimlessly ever since, their supplies depleting at an alarming rate. Occasionally Interceptor would catch a Leafer or some other small prey and bring it back to her, but game had grown more and more scarce the farther they got and the chillier the weather became. She had been a hair's breadth away from telling the Clyde in her mind to go fuck a llama and trying to turn back southward to Mobliz when the ocean had come into view and the little settlement along with it. There had been much rejoicing, but only temporarily; now this weathered lady in her patched trousers and funny hat was telling Relm she had gone too far north and had at least another three weeks of walking ahead of her. Fuck fuck _fuck. _  
**  
**Numbly she turned to go back the way she had come, but Relm's legs didn't seem to want to work the way she wanted them to. She fought it hard, grabbing onto a fence-post as her knees buckled beneath her, but it was no use – she was going down, swooning like a heroine in one of those penny dreadful romance novels Celes used to read when she thought nobody was looking. _How embarrassing, _Relm thought faintly, just before her grip slipped and the ground rushed up to meet her face.

Before she had even fallen halfway a strong pair of arms had her around the waist, carrying her inside the cabin. Relm found it funny that Interceptor didn't even growl at the stranger when he was usually so overprotective but gave it no more question, letting sleep and the broad arms do what they would with her exhausted body.

---

When Relm finally awoke it was to the sound of a crackling fire and the smell of beef broth in the air. For a few seconds she felt vague and confused - was she still back at home with Strago? Had the previous two months been a long, strange dream? The pillow underneath her head was soft and comforting, and it was so nice to just lie there and pretend that nothing had ever changed, that she was still safe in her bed back in Thamasa …

But the moment passed as quickly as it had come, and soon enough all of Relm's memories came flooding back in a bittersweet rush. Strago was dead and she was looking for Shadow, her real father. She had set off to track him down and gotten horribly lost somewhere on the Veldt. The odd woman with the funny hat must have picked her up and taken care of her after she fainted. At this thought the girl tried to sit bolt upright in the strange bed, but a bolt of pain shot through her temples and she sank back down into the feather pillows, weak and dizzy from the throbbing. Where the hell was her stuff? Where the hell were her _clothes_, for that matter? The pajamas she was wearing were about three sizes too big, smelled like mothballs, and were most definitely _not _hers.

Oh Goddesses, that meant that she'd been _undressed by a stranger. _Ew. Ew ew ew.

There was a dull thumping from the side of the bed. Relm glanced over and saw Interceptor lying on the floor, his gaze locked on her. The dog's heavy brush of a tail thudded against the hardwood again several times in greeting; he was obviously happy to see her awake and conscious once more. She narrowed her eyes at him and with some deliberation shook a thin finger in his direction.

"Traitor," she muttered, glaring daggers at her shaggy compatriot. "So now you're letting total strangers strip me naked and do _things _to me? What kind of guard-wolf are you anyhow? I'll remember this, fleabag."

But there was no malice in her voice and she dangled a hand over one side of the bed after only a moment's hesitation. Interceptor gave her an ingratiating doggy grin and crawled forward on his stomach to lick her hand apologetically, letting the girl scratch that tricky spot behind his left ear he could never quite reach even with a back leg. She was awake and speaking again. Interceptor's world was once more complete.

"Don't put the blame on your dog there, child. He watched me like a damned sparrowhawk every time I had a hand on you, but I was too quick and wily an old nanny for even him with his big yella eyes. Plus I had beef bones, and that wolf ain't half a fool when it comes to beef bones."

The voice came from Relm's left. She rolled her head slowly to face the sound and found the woman she had spoken to earlier standing quietly by, cookpot in one hand and wooden spoon in the other. Relm had expected to be quite angry when she met her molester once again, but the lady had such a good-natured face it was hard to hold a grudge for long.

"He hasn't moved from your bedside since you passed out, and that was near about two days ago," she continued, brandishing the spoon like a conductor's baton as the words spilled out. "I've been spooning soup down your throat for all that time and was starting to get a bit worried, but now that you're up and awake you can do it yourself, I reckon." The woman stuck a firm, calloused hand out to shake Relm's own; it was like exchanging pleasantries with a steel vice. "My name's Sally MacDonald, and you are lyin' in my bed. You can _also_ sleep in the extra room when you're feeling better, as I am quite fond of that bed and have missed it something fierce since you made your arrival. I figured you'd better have the one closest to the fire though; wasn't sure what was wrong with you but looks like it wasn't much more than hunger and exhaustion. We should have you fixed up by spring in no time flat."

Relm had been letting the woman's words wash over her in a broad tide, trying to absorb everything as best she could, but at the last sentence she lifted an eyebrow and raised herself up on her elbows in the bed. "I'm sorry Miss … MacDonald, was it? I can't stay until spring, I have to leave, like, soon. I've gotta get over Doma Channel before the blizzards start, and I appreciate your kindness, but …"

Sally laughed. It was a big booming laugh, not derisive or mocking but incredulous all the same. "Child, even if you had wings to fly down there you wouldn't make it before the blizzards started to hit. I'm afeared you're stuck here 'til spring, like it or not. You try to make it back to Doma Channel now and you and your partner there will be frozen stiff as Shiva within a week, I can practically guarantee it." Noting the girl's silence she added, "You were almost out of energy when you found me, and that was during good fall weather. I'm not a bad one to be stuck with for a few months, as long as you haul your weight around the place. Who knows, we might even get to liking each other, given enough time. Given enough time I could probably make friends with a golden bear, though, knowing me."

She turned to head back into the kitchen, but paused and turned around with a small smile on her lips. "Oh, and your clothes and other goods are piled up in the extra room; I gave 'em a good wash and tried to patch them up best I could. I gave _you_ a good wash, too, but don't worry, I didn't peek." The tall woman gave Relm a wink and returned to her cooking, leaving the visitor to blush and splutter, for once at a loss for words.

---

Children were funny things, tough as chocobo chicks to rear. Some of them flourished and grew like weeds in the harshest conditions, sprouting to young adulthood with nary a sniffle or cough. Others could have the best food and the best clothes and the best of everything, and they would just sicken and die one day for no reason whatsoever, leaving their parents and the doctors confused and baffled as to what had gone wrong. Sally knew this from experience; she had five fine sons buried back in Jidoor and not one had lived beyond the age of twelve, all of them stricken down with various maladies that should have been easily curable with the help of good medicine and treatment. Instead they had wasted away, the frail little bodies getting thinner and thinner under the coverlets as Sally desperately tried to spoon soup down their unresponsive throats. It was like they had lost the will to live, and this more than anything else had torn at the good woman's heart until she never wanted to see another youthful face again.

Sally had feared history was repeating itself when she picked up the slack, unresponsive body of her guest from the dust of the yard and carried her inside, and even after the girl woke up and it became apparent there was nothing more wrong with her than overexhaustion and hunger, Sally had worried somewhat. You had to _want_ to get better for it to happen, and the way the girl had lain there staring at the ceiling after Sally told her she was stuck hadn't exactly bespoken a thirst for living.

The stony silence and refusal to eat had gone on for nearly three days until both the dog and Sally were almost frantic. Then all of a sudden one morning the girl had risen from bed and surprised her host as she stood in the kitchen cutting up carrots for a stew.

"Relm," she'd muttered sulkily, studying what must have undoubtedly been the most interesting ladybug in the world as it made a valiant journey across the cobblestone floor. Sally hadn't even looked up from her slicing, letting the girl come to her in her own time as you would any wild young thing.

"I'm sorry, hon, you're gonna have to speak up. I can't make out a word you're saying."

"… My name is Relm. The dog's name is Interceptor. Is there, like, anything you want me to do around here or what?"

At those surly words Sally had smiled, knowing things were going to be just fine. If a teenager had enough belly to be surly they had enough belly to keep on living, that's what she figured, and as usual her intuition proved correct. Within the day Relm was sitting by the fire peeling potatoes, and when dinnertime rolled around she even consented to eat a bowl of fish stew, making sure to wrinkle her nose in disgust at the concoction first just to make sure her feelings on the matter were well-known.

"You're as picky and fussy as a broody hen, aren't you?" Sally commented, watching the girl peer suspiciously at the thick ochre-coloured soup in her saucer. "Your friend over there seems to like it just fine; take a tip from him and eat like you've got some stomach in you. I take it as an insult to my cookin' skills otherwise."

Interceptor was gravely polite but never overly expressive with Sally; even to a blind person it would've been obvious where the dog's loyalty lay. He worshipped the ground his young mistress walked on and was never far behind wherever she went, sleeping by the side of the extra bed with one prick-ear cocked in case anyone dared intrude on her slumber. How Sally had managed to pick the girl up and carry her indoors that day without being ripped to pieces she would never know, but she generally put it down to Interceptor being a canny and intuitive creature who could tell right from wrong easier than most humans the widow had met in her time. Relm couldn't have been safer if she'd worn Magitek armor and travelled with a retinue of armed guards by her side.

Almost grudgingly Relm started to open up about herself, eventually telling Sally where she was from and the name of the man she was looking for. She didn't say _why_ she was trailing the fellow or volunteer any more information about her past that day, but Sally got the feeling it wouldn't be long before it all came out. Relm didn't seem like much of an introvert to her – occasionally sulky, sure, and maybe even a little cautious of strangers, but not naturally quiet. The girl _wanted _to talk, and more and more as the days went by she did, a slowly building stream of chatter that filled the lonely cabin and Sally's ears like flash flood waters on drought-stricken land. Sally had always been a talker (with an infamously loud voice to boot; Bill had joked you could hear her talking in Jidoor if you put your ear to the ground in Zozo), so finding this kindred spirit had been quite the stroke of luck indeed.

After a short stint with Relm doing housechores for the first week or so, Sally took the girl out one cold fall morning and introduced her to Bill the chocobo, who was having a very good pout in his stall when the three came to visit. Usually Sally would take him out several times a week hooked to a travois to collect fuel – driftwood from the coast, buffalax droppings if kindling was scarce – but she had been preoccupied with her guest and hadn't bothered to for several days beforehand. Bill never missed an opportunity to lay back his crest-feathers and balk when asked to do a lick of work, but being ignored seemed to insult the big black bird even more. When Sally entered the stable he wouldn't even look at her, pushing his broad head into Relm's chest instead.

"That's good," Sally said dryly, watching the bird affectionately nuzzle the girl until she could barely keep her feet under the barrage. "He seems to have taken a liking to you, which may or may not be of some help when he realizes you're not going to fall for that BS any more than I do. Let's see how those doe-eyes look when they see you get out the travois and saddle, eh? If he lets you put the damned things on without a fuss I'll give you the big bed and sleep in the barn m'self, see if I don't."

When Relm came riding back later that evening with Interceptor trotting along behind, Sally was waiting in the doorway to help her unload the fuel. The first few flakes of snow whirled down from a leaden sky onto the little group; Sally greeted them with a shout while Bill blinked his huge eyes and shook his feathers against the sudden wetness. Interceptor snapped at a few of the white specks experimentally and then ignored the rest, choosing to study Relm's upturned face instead.

Winter had arrived.


	5. V

_

V

_

There had never been a chocobo stable in Thamasa, although once or twice the good citizens had tried to petition for one when there was nothing more interesting to petition for. Many theories had been put forward to explain this strange absence - some said it was because there wasn't anywhere on the island you couldn't get to on foot just as fast as a mounted rider, while others surmised that perhaps the magic aura of the townsfolk would leave any nearby livestock nervous and high-strung, unfit for handling.

Relm knew the real reason why, though: chocobos shat like _crazy_. No-one wanted the job of mucking out a chocobo stable and even if they _had_ there wouldn't have been anywhere to put all the massive piles of shit when they were finished and done. She had learned this through grim experience over the past month and a half, having pulled the short straw when the time came to pick out the rota of chores she and Sally would be sharing.

She stopped heaving guano into a wheelbarrow in the corner long enough to give Bill, who was peering over the side of the spare stall at her curiously, an upraised and venomous middle finger.

"Fuck you, bird," she gasped, leaning on the handle of her pitchfork for support. "Next time you want to take a shit I'm going to stick a cork up your butt and let it stay in _there_ instead. Where the _hell _do you get it all from?"

Bill just blinked at her solemnly in the lantern-light. Relm blew a raspberry at him and went back to her shovelling, thankful at least that the stable was warm and snug. There was a snowstorm raging outside, great gusts of stinging flakes sweeping down in thick veils to obscure visibility and freeze extremities, but here inside the barn with Interceptor and Bill it was surprisingly mild. She'd even worked up a bit of a sweat, a new experience in Relm's world, where any strenuous activity had always been quickly taken out of her hands by the overprotective and slightly fawning Strago. Ladies, he had said, were delicate flowers, made by the Goddesses to be spoiled and looked after. No granddaughter of _his _was going to engage in manual labour, not if he could help it. Stay inside the house and paint, Relm, while Grandad goes and kills this monster for the nice men.

Pfft. Not a damned chance. She had loved her grandfather dearly, but if old age hadn't gotten to him first she probably would've.

Sally seemed to be a lot more understanding and a lot more blasé about such matters, perhaps because she had been a headstrong girl herself once (or so she said). Relm had gotten quite attached to the widow over her two months there and was going to be sad to see the last of her when spring came and the journey resumed, although she was still restless and eager to push onwards before much more time passed. Gau's words had somehow been encouraging; _surely_ Edgar would know where Shadow had gone, being, as he was, a big gay gossip-whore. If it was interesting and happened within 45,000 miles of Edgar Figaro's domain you could be pretty sure he had heard about it, discussed it, analyzed it, and possibly written a book of poetry on the matter with which to woo the ladies. He would know where Clyde Arrowny was, or Relm would eat her beret. Well, it or Sally's fedora, which was about three sizes too big for her and which she was also wearing just then as she worked.

Interceptor lay nearby on a clean pile of straw, watching the girl with some curiosity. Eventually she finished and came to sit down beside him, stroking the dog's thick winter coat with a grimy hand. The wind howled outside and the walls of the little stable shook slightly under its force, but indoors all was still, the only sound Bill rattling his feed bucket impatiently. Relm plopped back into the hay and closed her eyes, enjoying the smell of the fresh straw and the momentary peace of the barn. Back at the house there would be fried fish and good talk with Sally and a huge copper washtub filled to the brim with steaming hot water, but for now the best thing in the world was lying still. She ran her hands through the straw idly, tracing individual grass stems and the groove of the floorboards and the contours of big heavy metal rings with her fingertips.

… Wait, big heavy metal rings?

An experimental tug confirmed what she had originally felt – there was a big steel ring set into the floor. Sweeping the hay away revealed that the ring was in fact a handle, designed to pull open a small trapdoor beneath the floorboards of the barn.

Relm knew everyone had secrets, and Relm knew better than to pry. However, Relm also had a burning curiosity about things that led her to scour the house thoroughly every year in the four weeks leading up to her birthday. She had also been known to accidentally hold letters not addressed to her over steaming tea kettles for long periods of time – quite by accident, of course. It was just the sort of thing that happened to her.

It seemed to be happening again; before Relm could stop her hands from acting the damned things had collaborated against her and pulled open the trapdoor. She found herself peering down into a tiny alcove, just big and deep enough to accommodate the hinged wooden box nested neatly inside it. How very curious. Once again Relm's hands took the incentive and pulled the box up out of its hole, ignoring completely her brain's cries of _no no no you stupid shithead it's hidden for a REASON what the hell are you doing?_

Apparently her hands and legs had some sort of joint conspiracy thing going on as well, because within seconds she was crouching inside one of the empty stalls fiddling carefully with the box's latch. Relm had been very well-educated by Locke on the proper way to spring a bolt – much to Strago's chagrin - and this rusty little hasp was no challenge to her; after a few jerks and liberal use of a spare hairpin the box easily opened, squeaking in protest as she pushed back the lid on its hinges to reveal …

Newspaper clippings, yellowing and crumbly around the edges. Lots and lots of them.

Somehow this seemed like a let-down, and Relm didn't even know what she had been expecting. Perhaps a severed head, or some dried-up candy, or a dragon's egg, or maybe even more chocobo shit. _Anything _would have been more interesting than a boxful of dusty old newspapers. She picked one up gently and held it to the lamplight, trying to make out the faded words and pictures as best she could in the dimness of the stall.

The headline was easy enough to read: it said _**'BANK ROBBERS STRIKE IN MOBLIZ AGAIN!**_' and contained so many exclamation marks they very nearly ran off the edge of the page. Below it was the article itself, a breathless and sensationally-written account of how two armed bandits had held up the biggest bank in Mobliz and run off with a great deal of cash. There was an interesting catch to this story, though, one that raised it above the average tabloid fare – one of them had been a woman, 'tall of stature and slender of build.' Neat, but Relm still didn't see why the clipping was important enough to warrant being locked away in a hidden box underneath the freakin' stables.

She rifled through several more of the papers. All of them seemed to be about the same pair of thieves robbing banks and stagecoaches all over the eastern continent; the most widely-printed story had the two ransacking the Doma Railway, after which they were never heard from again, disappearing into the ether like creatures of legend. Some speculated that one or both had been wounded during the train robbery, while others surmised perhaps they had just finally gotten enough money to be satisfied. Nearly all of the sources had agreed on one thing, though: any woman who would behave in such a manner was a disgrace to her gender and deserved to be hung as soon as the authorities could manage it. A man turning outlaw was one thing, but a _woman …_

"I recall telling you to clean the stables, but for the life of me I can't recollect when it was I gave the order to go dig up my past like a dog tunnelling after an armadillo."

Relm froze. Sally was leaning in over the stall's windowsill, both elbows propped casually against the splintery wood frame. Her chin rested between her fists and there was an amused expression on her face - Relm had been so engrossed in the newspapers she'd never even heard the older woman coming.

"Let's you and me go back to the house and have a nice long chat, hmm? I don't know about you, but spillin' my guts in a place that smells like bird shit just doesn't _feel _right, you know?"

---

Sally didn't have a lot of luxury items – most all of them had been left behind in Jidoor when she and Bill left, probably sold off at auction when everybody realized they'd scarpered – but the one or two she _did _still own were guarded jealously from all comers, the last precious vestiges of a long-vanished life. The feather bed was one, and her cane rocking chair with the cushion in the bottom another.

Bill had said there was no damned way they could haul that thing all to the way to the ferry in South Figaro, and that wasn't even taking into account the Veldt journey they would have to make afterwards. The monsters would get it, _and_ them, and _then_ who would be left to sit in the blasted thing, he'd asked her? But Sally had been just as stubborn back then as she was now; after a lot of arguing and some wonderfully foul language on her part the rocking chair had been tied securely inside the wagon. Bill had never ceased grumbling about that rocker until the day he died, but Sally just suspected that was because he had to sit in hideback chairs and his rear hurt him all the time.

She was only forty-four and had heard some say only old women sat in such devices, but that was bunkum, plain and simple. Anybody who couldn't appreciate a good rocking chair on the front porch in the evenings deserved to get piles, that's what Sally thought. The rocker was Sally MacDonald's throne, and from it she held court on such riveting subjects as whether to have fish or peas for supper that night, or if the chimney needed sweeping.

At the moment it was dragged up next to the fire, runners creaking slightly as Sally made it list back and forth with her heels. She kicked it back into motion every time it slowed; the habit had become so ingrained over the years it was like blinking, or riding a chocobo. Just something she did, an involuntary reaction.

The little wooden box Relm had discovered sat nestled in Sally's lap, its contents spilling out over her lap and thighs. She sorted through the clippings for a long time with a fond smile on her lips before finally adjusting her glasses and looking back up at Relm, who was seated nervously on the hearth with Interceptor at her feet.

"Yep, that was me. I was _cute _back then too, honey, let me tell you what. Bill could circle my waist with his hands, and you couldn't find many train robbers with 22-inch waists even back then." She sighed, carefully shuffling the papers back into their box. "We were poor, and when you're poor you don't give a rat's arse about king's laws. It moved me into a big house in Jidoor with lots of pretty things and lots to eat, and when I was a young thing like you that's all I wanted out of life. Nowadays all I care about is the eatin' part, if you want the Goddesses' honest truth."

Relm had been very quiet since coming in from the barn, either ashamed of her nosiness or half-frozen from the snowstorm or possibly both. Now she raised her eyes and – timidly, for once – tried to speak, curiosity overcoming hesitation.

"But … why didn't you just stay there, if you had so much money?"

"Why did _you _leave your nice comfortable home, not countin' the fact that you're looking for somebody?" Sally retorted. She wasn't about to get into the painful reasons she'd left Jidoor, not with this sprig of a girl. Relm had become like a daughter to her over the cold winter months, but some things were just too tender to dig up for anybody's sake. The row of little headstones was etched almost photographically in her memory; there was no need to make the images even clearer by discussing the matter. "I got sick of people, so we left. The birds and the bees and all the other critters keep me company here, and when I need supplies I just hook up Bill and go to Mobliz on the ferry. Settlers keep creeping north and I won't even have to go _that_ far, damn their inquisitive hides." Annoyance flashed over her face and was gone in an instant, replaced by her usual calm expression.

"Your turn now, dearie. What exactly is so powerfully important about Clyde Arrowny, exactly? I know the name – you'd've had to been deaf, dumb and blind not to have heard of the rascal after _his _robbery - although I've never met him and wouldn't know him from Adam if he jumped on my bed. After my time, y'see."

The look she gave Relm was kindly, but behind the reading glasses her eyes were keen as knives. They harpooned the girl with understanding and authority in equal parts; in the face of them there was nothing Relm could do but answer. It all came gushing out before she had time to think: her childhood in Thamasa, the pretty mother who had died not long after giving birth, her strict but loving grandfather, and the adventures three years previous that had shaken the roots of the world – everything of importance was laid at Sally's booted feet.

By the time Relm finished her story the fire had burned down to glowing embers and Interceptor was fast asleep, paws twitching slightly as he battled dream enemies of indeterminate size and number. Sally had listened with unwavering interest throughout the entire tale, interrupting only to interject with an occasional, "Well I'll be damned," or "I knew some Gabbianis in my time. Good family, silk merchants." Her eyebrows shot up rather precipitously when Relm got to Strago's letter but she said nothing, the pressed line of her lips hidden behind steepled fingers. When the end of the tale was reached Sally sat for a long time without saying anything at all, staring into the red coals of the fireplace like a scryer with a particularly puzzling set of entrails to decipher.

"Child, tell me something," she finally said, sounding much more thoughtful than usual. "What exactly do your expect to happen if and when you find this daddy of yours?"

Relm blinked, surprised. This wasn't one of the questions she had expected.

"I … I never really thought about it, to be honest," she admitted. "I just want to find him. Maybe he can tell me about my mom. I want to know what she was like, what _he's_ like, you know?" Her brow creased. "And ... I wanna know why he left me like that. Is there something wrong with me that he knew about? Why the hell didn't he want me, Sally? He never even _tried _to come and see me, the asshole..."

There was a hurt tone in Relm's voice that wounded Sally's matronly heart to the quick. Without giving it a second thought she rose from her seat and gathered Relm in her tanned arms, rocking the astonished girl as she would a very young child.

"Shush now. It ain't your fault, honey. Ain't nobody's fault. If anything's wrong with anybody, it's the father and not the daughter, I can sure as hell tell you that." She stroked Relm's cornsilk curls gently. "Sometimes weird things go on in people's heads and there's just no accounting for it. And robbers and rascals is some of the strangest people you're ever likely to meet, take it from me. Sometimes it's not safe to hang around one place for long and you've gotta move on to protect your family. I wouldn't judge the man until I got the whole story from his side, anyways."

She rose to her feet, giving Relm one last final squeeze on the shoulder. "I want you to think long and hard about why you're doing this, Relm. Think 'bout why exactly you want to find Mister Arrowny, and about what you expect from him once you _do_ meet up, ken?"

"Yes'm."

"_That's_ my gal."

Relm sat on the hearth by herself for some time afterwards, already deep in thought on the matter.

---

The rest of the winter passed uneventfully, one grey day bleeding into another without incident. Relm's time was taken up with chores and lessons; Sally had become intensely determined to teach her young protégé how to cook, and quite surprisingly Relm took to the task like a blue chocobo to water. She was a competent chef and a whiz when it came to handling Bill (who fell in love with her, much to Sally's amusement), but sewing and fishing tested her notoriously short patience, and the only way Sally could lure the girl into getting these things done was with the promise of a story once she finished.

Relm became addicted to Sally's tales of her past life as a bandit. Sally was a master storyteller with a colourful vocabulary, and every scenario played out like a scene from a Jidoor opera when she told it. Not one of those boring, stuffy operas either - like one of the _good _ones, with murders and duels and narrow escapes galore. Sometimes Sally would get so caught up in her own telling she would come clear out of her seat, clawing at the air and pantomiming bayonet strokes with a coat-rack. Relm watched all this with a rapt expression and shining eyes, taking each and every word in like a thirsty young sponge. Strago had nevertold her stories quite like these, but then he had been a decent, law-abiding citizen throughout most of his long life. Sally's histories were filled with danger and good-natured lawlessness, and quite understandably this appealed to Relm's sense of mischief more than many a moralistic tale from her grandfather had.

"I'm kinda glad you found that box," Sally once said, after relating a particularly lurid anecdote involving dynamite, lost treasure, and an Albrook brothel. "Can't tell these stories to anybody else except Bill, and he's heard them all before. If you'd been around back then we could've had ourselves a time!"

_If only_, Relm often thought to herself sadly. The world before her birth sounded like it had been a much more exciting and vibrant place, filled with colourful characters and adventure. Relm had certainly experienced her share of both during the Returners War – perhaps a little more than she would have liked, in a few cases - but those days had come and gone before she was even old enough to appreciate them. Now that Relm was in her teens everything had become dull and colourless, blandified. Magic was gone, the last wild places were all but disappearing, and very soon she would be expected to settle down and behave as a young woman. Screw _that_. Young women (at least the ones Relm had known in Thamasa) were expected to dress demurely and mind their manners at all times, never raising their voices or causing a scene. Relm _lived _for causing a scene. She liked flashy clothes and practical jokes and big greasy meals of eggs and pancakes; her lifestyle and that of a young lady were incompatible to the nth degree.

She had resigned herself to the inevitability of young ladyship long ago, but that was before Sally. The only female role models Relm had had access to previously were Terra and Celes, and while Relm loved and admired both of them as sister-aunts, she didn't exactly want to _be _like them. Terra was sweet but quiet and Celes was the closest thing to a warrior queen Relm had ever met - not really her style on either front. _Sally_, on the other hand, swore and wore hats and got her hands dirty, in addition to being an ex-train robber. She was her own person, and Relm admired her greatly.

Sometimes she wondered what Shadow was doing now. He had been a robber before her birth and a ninja afterwards; what kind of adventure was _he _hunting down out there? Occasionally she had dreams about bringing him back to meet Sally once they were reunited, and how the two would fall in love and get married. The four of them would become famous across the land, getting into scrape after wild scrape. Books would be written about the bandit family, and ballads sung in their honour. Relm would paint her memoirs, garnering praise and respect for the vividness and subject matter, and when she got enough money she would kick all the new people out of Thamasa and make it a sanctuary for adventurers. It would be _awesome._

All of this was rather presumptuous of her, she knew, but they were only dreams, and dreams certainly couldn't hurt anything. In the meantime she helped Sally with the chores, had long conversations with Interceptor about her hopes for the future, and waited as patiently as she could for the arrival of spring.


	6. VI

**_

VI

_**

Spring came to the Veldt not with a whimper, but with a bang. Several bangs, in fact, sharp cracking noises that startled the winter-wearied wildlife and rang out in the frosty night air like shots from a cannon. The ruckus so scared Relm, lying asleep in her bed, that she ran to Sally's room in a panic, pounding on the door frantically for what seemed like forever before the older woman finally yanked it open in high dudgeon.

"What in all of Ifrit's hellfires are you banging this door down for?" she grumped, blinking owlishly at the girl and her bristling dog. "Can't a poor old woman get any rest in the world?"

"Can't you hear the noise, Sally? We're under attack! Maybe it's a monster, or there's been an airship crash, or …"

Sally squinted disbelievingly at Relm for a moment and then laughed her big laugh. "You _are _a hoot, Relm Arrowny. That's the sound of the ice breakin' on Triangle Sound, you silly gosling. Go back to bed and put a pillow over your head if it bothers you so."

She slammed the door shut again, leaving a slightly abashed Relm and Interceptor alone in the darkness of the hallway.

---

The sounding of the ice seemed to be a signal to all of nature, a bugle call that lured green patches of grass back to the surface through the melting snow and birds back to the skies around the cabin in increasing numbers. Relm watched the changes with fascination, growing a little more restless each day as time went by and the weather became warmer and warmer. Interceptor's winter coat began to come out in thick black clumps and even Bill started to moult, until the landscape around Sally's homestead was piebald with their castings, great sable piles of wolf-wool and chocobo feathers dotting the snowy expanse in wind-blown tumbleweeds. The returning wrens and sparrows had a field day with all the nesting material available; long after Relm had Interceptor had gone south, families of swallows were being born and raised on Interceptor's shaggy fluff, shed countless months before.

Sally observed the turning season with joy, as she always did, but also with a little sadness. She knew that her young friend would soon feel the pull and move on, and she had also begun to realize just how much she was going to miss the girl's endless chatter and smart mouth. There was nothing wrong with being alone and Sally wouldn't have traded her life on the Veldt for anything, but it was still gonna be a shock when the cabin was once again empty and she was cooking for one.

Doing the chores all by her lonesome wasn't going to be a cakewalk either, but she kept that particular thought to herself.

Sure enough, one evening in early March while the two of them were on the front stoop peeling potatoes, Relm announced her intention to go.

"I think I'll start off tomorrow morning, Sally," she said, sounding both excited and somewhat subdued. "I'm really thankful for all your help, but I've gotta keep going. I'll come back and visit after I've found him, honest, but …"

"No need to explain things to me, honey. You go and find your daddy and get things settled, just be careful, alright? Then you can come back and paint me a portrait like you promised."

"I will, Miss Sally. I won't forget about you."

_And next time I'll bring Clyde with me,_ she added mentally, trying not to smirk at the thought.

Sally sat twisting a half-peeled potato in her hands thoughtfully after they had finished talking, obviously giving some matter a thorough going-over in her head. She carefully sat the tuber back with its brethren and placed a starchy hand on Relm's shoulder.

"Wait right here, child," she said, with a small smile. "I've got a few things I want to show you. Keep peeling those taters and I'll be right back."

"… It's not the clippings again, is it Sally? Or the bullet they dug out of your shoulder? Ew. You could've kept that secret, I wouldn't have minded."

"Neither. Hush your trap, Adamanchyt Tongue."

She disappeared into the house, leaving Relm to wait on the steps. Peeling potatoes was proving boring, so after awhile she began throwing the skins to Interceptor, who snapped them up gladly. It was one of the weirdest things about him, his love of vegetables. Looking at the dog you would think he was a strict meat-eater, but there you'd be wrong, because Interceptor was a strict _everything _eater. His especial favourite was tomato. Relm chunked another slice at his head and cheered him on as he caught it in mid-air, bolting the potato wedge down like it was a prime cut of sirloin steak.

Sally soon returned, a black velvet satchel in her hands.

"Should I come back later when you're done, or do you want to get some presents?" she deadpanned, standing directly behind Relm's back. Relm jumped nearly a foot and sheepishly moved over so Sally could sit back down, wondering as always how the robber-woman moved so damned quietly. Sally had often said the same thing about her, but she certainly didn't _feel _stealthy. More and more she felt that her limbs were too long and gangly, like a yearling chocobo with too much wingspan. People said it was all a part of growing up, but Relm wasn't so sure about this herself.

Gingerly, as though she were handling gold chocobo eggs, Sally slipped her hand inside the bag and extracted two items, both of which gleamed dully in the starlight. She carefully handed the first to Relm, placing it in her grubby fingers with as much reverence as Relm had ever seen the old lady display. Looking down at the object Relm realized it was a silver compass, well-built and extraordinarily heavy for such a small instrument.

"It was my grandpappy's," Sally said, staring at the navigational tool fondly. "He was a cartographer and often had need of such things. It's fancy and it's old, so take good care of it, y'hear me? That way you won't be gettin' lost and wandering into some other widow-woman's kitchen. I'm jealous that way."

Relm sat clutching at the compass, awestruck by such an important gift. It was almost overwhelming, being entrusted with such things. "Wow. You don't have to give me this, you know, I might lose it, or break it …"

"Here's hoping you do neither. If I keep it the damned thing will just sit in my dresser and tarnish, at least you'll be givin' it a use. Now, as for the next sussy, it ain't as expensive or antique, but I love it just the same." She held the item aloft in the air, the better for Relm to see. Moonlight glinted and glimmered off six inches of polished steel, razor-edged and pointed and deadly. Sally seemed to relish the sight, looking upon it with as much love and pride as she had the old compass.

"This … _this_ is my baby. I bought this dagger in Doma long before the Returner Wars, back when people still lived there, and there weren't no finer metalsmiths in all the world than the Domans." Sally smiled. "It came in handy on many a heist and many an adventure, but my caperin' days are over. You take it, girl. You never know when you'll need a good knife; it might come in handy someday."

She aimed the weapon at Relm, handle-first. Relm took it carefully, hefting the blade experimentally with her right hand. She made a few false jabs at the air to see how it felt and Sally laughed, amused with the girl's boldness as always.

"There's a fine scabbard that comes with it, but I'd advise you to put it in your knapsack and not wear it around like a piece of flashy jewellery. Keep it clean, watch your fingers, and don't treat it as a toy." Sally thumped Relm on the back, nearly knocking the wind out of her lungs. "You can't lose with that weapon in your hand. You'll be fine, I warrant. Paintin' illusions is all good and tricksey, but sometimes cold steel settles arguments better than brush-bristles."

"Sally, I … really don't know what to say. Goddesses, how am I supposed to pay you back for this?"

"Oh, you just come back safe and see me someday and we'll call it even. Well … that, and you can get a move on peeling those potatoes. No shirkin', I don't care if you're going to the bleeding _moon _tomorrow. Tonight you got peelin' to do."

Relm suddenly wondered if the gifts were quite worth it after all.

---

The morning dawned fair and cool, pink candy-floss clouds drifting northward in an unsettled red sky. Relm was up with the larks, packing her things, making sure and doubly-sure she had plenty of supplies (after that lean month on the Veldt the fall before, Relm was taking no chances with food; her knapsack was filled to bursting with enough provisions to at _least _get them to Nikeah eating like kings), and generally being a nuisance and a pest to her host in their final hours together. Sally understood the bee in Relm's beret and eventually ordered her to a chair at the kitchen table, slipping the restless girl an earthenware mug of chai tea while she gathered the last of the dry goods herself.

"If I don't do it myself you'll be all gettin' up under me the entire morning," she said, pushing her spectacles up the bridge of her broad nose authoritatively. When Sally adjusted her wire-rims like that you might as well just give in, because the iron will was firmly in place and not even a team of draft chocobos would budge _that_ obstacle. "Just sit tight and you'll be back to freezing your butt blue on the Veldt before y'know it. Enjoy the hospitality of my kitchen in the meanwhile."

It _was _a very nice kitchen, Relm had to admit. She hadn't even known kitchens like this existed outside of fairy tales and real estate brochures. The floor was cobbled, the stone fireplace gigantic, and if there wasn't something delicious simmering on the big iron stove yet there probably would be, if you waited a moment or two. It was one of those spacious kitchens that perpetually smelled like gingerbread, and Relm was going to be sad to see the back of it. The sight of the morning sunlight glinting off the polished black surface of the stovetop and Sally's copper cookpots made her feel a little depressed, but she consoled herself with the thought that she would be back someday and pushed the low spirits to one side. She'd cook dinner for Sally _and _Clyde in here soon, wait and see.

Sally soon returned with the final items and they were packed neatly in Relm's sack alongside all her other belongings. There was nothing stopping her from leaving.

They set off for the borders of Sally's land in silence. The robber-woman had been quiet most of the morning but insisted on coming along to see them off, saying it was good luck to watch companions out of sight at the beginning of a journey. Relm didn't mind. Sally was a big, protective mamma bear that way, and having a big protective mamma bear see you off _had _to be good luck of some kind.

When they finally reached the rotted old post Sally had set up as a boundary marker, Relm was suddenly and unceremoniously grabbed into a rib-snapping, breath-crushing bear hug, smothered head-first in a warm calico bosom that smelled like pipe smoke and lye soap and freshly-cut hay. She managed to untangle her arms long enough to reciprocate the embrace; it was like hugging a big flannel barrel with boobs.

_I'll miss you, big flannel barrel with boobs_, she thought, and she meant it.

"Come back and see me like you promised, girl," Sally finally said, releasing Relm so she could come up for air. The old fedora's brim had been pulled down until a low shadow hid its owner's eyes; Relm couldn't be sure, but she thought Sally might be crying, and it made her own eyes sting in sympathy. They stung even worse when Sally landed a powerful slap right on the small of her back. "Now, _git, _before you embarrass the both of us. Shoo! B'gone! And no lookin' back! I hate soppy goodbyes."

Relm didn't look back, but she kept her hand on Interceptor's steadying ruff the entire way. She could feel Sally's eyes on them until they crested a hill and went out of sight.

---

With the help of Sally's compass and despite the onset of a freak cold snap shortly after leaving, Relm and Interceptor made good time moving southward, their journey unblighted by any other kind of delay or danger. The temperature was chill and the wind had an edge to daunt even Sally's sharp dagger, but with the aid of her Mobliz cloak – a wonderfully thick blend, if still a little too bland-looking for Relm's taste – and Interceptor's shaggy presence she managed to stay warm, if not entirely comfortable. Your fingers turned the most peculiar shade of blue in bitter cold. Relm had already decided to try and mix up a batch in her paints next time there was an opportunity for such things, and she knew exactly what she would call it: Hypothermic Harmony. Oh yes. It would sell like …well, _some_ kind of cake, if not exactly a hot one.

Nature strained against the unusual weather, for it was approaching April and the land was already covered with a fine layer of green fuzz, like the down on a newly-hatched chocobo chick. Almost every morning there was frost on the ground, coating the grass, the rocks, and Relm's sleeping blankets in chilly condensation. Scraping it off her belongings gave Relm the heebie-jeebies and each day she hoped the next one would be warmer, but they never seemed to get that way. She began to wish they had stayed back at Sally's for a little while longer, maybe until July or August or whenever the sun finally exploded in a raging inferno. _Anything _for some heat. Interceptor wasn't bothered in the least by any of this; he and his kind were creatures of the cold, and had adapted to their environment by evolving thick, dense coats and massive paws to act as makeshift snowshoes. There wasn't much snow about, but the fur came in handy, keeping him snug and warm when cold winds snarled across the Veldt.

The weather was foul, but the two travellers had each other, and this was all that mattered to either. Together they crossed the plains, helping one another out when help was needed, and soon enough the mountains of Doma appeared on the distant horizon, craggy and black against the broad expanse of dirty-white sky.


	7. VII

_

VII

_**_  
_  
**"We have to cross _that?_"

The tone of Relm's voice was that half-disgusted, half-dismayed whining pitch she used for complaining about everything from the price of oil canvas to the prospect of having to climb Kefka's Tower. Doma Channel was hardly an obstacle on the level of the latter, but Relm was cranky, and more than a little tired of things popping up again and again in her way. She was determined but not_ indefatigable_, dammit.

It really wasn't much of a channel at all. An able-bodied seaman would have called it a piss-stream and swum across several times just to prove his point, but Relm was no able-bodied seaman, as foul a tongue as she had. To _her_ eyes the length of unbroken ice seemed to go on forever, a glittering gate they would have to vault before continuing onwards to Nikeah and the Kingdom of Figaro beyond. Things would've been easier if the water had been allowed to thaw – there was even a little rowboat on the shore, moored securely to a rotting plinth coated in hoarfrost – but no, the terrible cold snap had locked the channel up in one gigantic sheet of ice. Stray had it in for her, Relm was almost _sure_ of it by this point. Fucking cat. She was going to have words with Setzer about his choice of deity next time they met, strong ones.

There were two choices Relm could make, and neither sounded particularly enticing. Either she could strike out across the ice and simply walk to Doma – and what a slippery, ass-busting adventure _that _would surely turn out to be – or they could wait until the ice thawed and broke up, allowing boats to be piloted once again. Relm was not in the mood for busting her ass _or _waiting, but the latter sounded about ten times more unappetizing than the former after having already stalled the entire winter. Even the idea of an extra day of hanging around made Relm want to scream and hop around like a Magitek experiment gone awry, possibly re-arranging entire continents as she went. Fuck waiting. Waiting was a _whore_, a whore that needed to get _fucked_, and Relm told the world so in no uncertain terms, shouting it to the chilly blue sky and the ice sheet and the purple line of Doma far to the west. Ordinarily she might have been answered by the cry of seabirds and the lapping of waves, but not today. It was eerily quiet, and the only reply was her own voice echoing back in the crisp air, noticeably amplified by the ice and cold.

It made Relm mad somehow, this silence. It seemed like a challenge, like nature was giving her the finger in failing to acknowledge her existence. She was already irritable, and this was just the final straw in putting her teeth on edge.

"Fine!" she screamed, stomping a red-booted foot several times in the frozen sand to emphasize her words. "You want a fight, you chocobo-fucker? You got it!"

And with that declaration of intent Relm stepped out onto the ice, proud and warlike, golden curls glistening in the sun. There was a brief moment of uprightness - then the world slipped and slid away under her feet and she was staring up at the sky again, Interceptor looming over her with a worried and slightly puzzled expression on his face.

This was going to take some getting used to.

She hauled herself up with the help of Interceptor (_he _had no trouble, with his claws and four-footed balance) and tried again, this time managing to stay on her feet for more than four seconds before crashing back down to the ice again. Slowly but surely she began to get the hang of it, letting herself slide along the surface with a gliding motion not unlike that of a pair of ice-skaters she had seen in Narshe once while on a visit to see Celes and Locke. Relm remembered how they had moved, and while there was no way in Ifrit's seven hells she was going to be able to attain that level of grace simply wearing boots, she _did_ manage to make some headway, pushing off and letting momentum carry her forward as far as it could before she had to awkwardly kick herself into motion once again.

It almost became fun, once you got up a lot of speed. It was like flying, and Relm had always loved flying. Setzer had been forced to pry her off the balustrade an uncountable number of times when she got too close to the railing, saying Strago would kill him if she fell to her messy, splattery, entrail-spilling death. There was nothing and nobody stopping her today, and with a joy she hadn't felt in ages she pushed on forward, pulling away from the shore faster and faster until the surrounding ice was nothing but a blur in her wake. She laughed and whooped, her anger dissipating as quickly as it had come.

Interceptor had been dutifully following along behind, uneasy but unflinchingly loyal to the girl as always. The ice had seemed safe at first (if a little uncomfortable under his pads), but the farther they moved outwards the more he sensed that something wasn't quite right. Eventually the bad feeling became so strong he stopped in his tracks, whining softly to get the attention of the girl several feet ahead. She didn't notice. He _whuffed_ in his throat, louder this time, but the thrill of speed had all her attention.

Wolves don't bark and Interceptor did so only on rare occasions, but this was stressful enough to call for more vocalization than just a whimper or a whuff. His bark rang out sharply in the still air, loud enough that Relm slowed and turned to look back. She grinned and motioned for him to come on, then disappeared beneath the ice without a sound.

Relm was not a cold weather person. She had grown up in conditions that, while they could get chilly, never dipped below a certain range of the thermometer, and she didn't have the foggiest clue as to what rotten ice looked or felt like. If she _had_, there would have been no luring her out on the middle of that sheet for love or gil. The thin ice buckled like wet tissue paper underneath her, so sodden and soaked through it didn't even make a cracking sound as it gave way. One moment she was looking back at Interceptor; the next the water had taken her, black and voidlike under her feet in the fraction of a second before it enveloped her entirely.

It was _cold_, cold as a Narshe wind, and it soaked into her clothes and all the way down to her skin and weighed her down so that she couldn't get to the surface no matter how hard she tried. She was struggling back towards the hole, fighting the endless black current that wanted to pull her under the ice, but it was hard, and the sunbeams streaming down through the gap seemed to get further and further away with every second that passed. Relm could still see the sky, blurry and distorted through the waves, and with all her strength she reached _up, _up towards that blue expanse, and as she did a hand unexpectedly shot down to meet her own and dragged her, gasping and choking, back onto the firm ice in one smooth motion.

She found herself looking up into the face of Gau, worry and anger and relief battling for dominance across his features.

---

It took a lot to piss Gau off. Like the animals that had raised him, unless he was mistreated or maligned in some way anger simply did not affect him at all. His head was cool, his temperament sound – temper-wise he was the direct opposite of volatile Relm, laid-back as a Narshean cucumber.

A fumingly angry Gau was something Relm had never witnessed before. She almost _liked _it, weird as it sounded. He didn't seem like such a doormat when he was pacing around with that look in his eye like a bull rhinox in rut.

Back and forth he went, jaw muscles clenched tightly beneath the tanned skin. Relm huddled closer to the fire the boy had somehow started up – it had all been a blur after he pulled her out, Interceptor howling and Gau straining to half-carry, half-drag her back to the shoreline across the slippery ice and her going numb from shoulders to toes – and watched him storm around with something like awe. If _this_ was what it took to make Gau grow some cojones, she should go ice-swimming every day. The thought made her snigger; Gau caught the laugh and turned to face her, his teeth bared in a snarl.

"You think this is _funny, _Relm? You could've died! No-one would know where you gone!" He gesticulated wildly, trying to find the right words to convey how atrociously angry he was with her. She had put her own life at risk doing something foolish. Nothing else she could've done would have sent him into as blind a rage. "Don't you know ice is weak right now? Didn't you see the sun coming out? Don't you _ever _think?"

… Okay, it had gone beyond cute and right back into irritating now. Relm narrowed her eyes and gave him her infamous Glare of Death. Teachers had gotten it, Strago had been exposed to it so much he had built up an immunity, but this was the first time she had ever put it to use on Gau. She expected him to drop dead the moment their eyes met.

"This coming from _you_?" she sneered, turning the withering stare on him full force. "Yes, as a matter of fact I _do_. And what do _you_ care, anyway? Were you following me or something? That is kinda hella-creepy, Gau."

Gau's face registered embarrassment for a brief second before hardening back into anger. "A good thing for you if I was," he muttered, kicking at a tuft of grass furiously. "Don't you care if you die? There are other people who care about you beside Interceptor, you know. Don't be so selfish." His tone softened slightly.

Relm snorted in response. "Whatever." She shivered, trying to get as close to the fire as possible without actually sitting inside the flames. "How exactly am I supposed to cross the channel if not by foot, exactly? You keep saying I didn't think but I don't know what the heck I could have done otherwise. Yeesh, Gau, chilly down."

"Wait until ice melts. Then you can just use the boat to get across; it's what you should have done in the first place." He shook his head, incredulous. "Slow down. Don't be so impatient next time. Practise while you're waiting for the floe to break up."

"Aww, come _on, _I can't wait here another week! Do you know how long I've hung around already anyway? I—Gau?"

There was no-one there. Gau was gone again, silent as a passing thought.

---

_I hate him, _Relm told herself. _He's flighty and he laughs too much and he probably pees on the carpet and licks his own butt. I hate him and his smile and his perfect teeth (and how the HELL do you get teeth that nice when you grew up with monsters and live in the middle of nowhere?) and I would've rather been saved by an Allo Ver. **  
**  
I'll bet he can't even spell contrition like I can: c-o-n-t-r-i-t-i-o-n. See? What a dummy._

But none of this explained why the hell she couldn't stop thinking about him for the rest of the week, waiting for the ice to thaw, nor did it explain why she came to her feet every time a twig popped or the grass moved behind her little campsite.

It wasn't guilt, of course. It wasn't like she would have _thanked _him for what he'd done if he _had_ re-appeared, and she certainly wouldn't have apologized for being such a brat, because in her opinion there was nothing to apologize _for_. She could've gotten out of the water fine herself. It was just boredom making her want to talk to another human being, that was all.

_Contrition. _She tasted the letters on her tongue. _How the hell did I remember **that** word?_


	8. VIII

_ VIII_

_  
_  
_His hackles have been bristling ever since they entered the forest. Normally dark and gloomy woodlands do not bother the dog – he is half-wolf and such places are his natural habitat, after all – but there is something wrong here, something deeply unnatural and unsettling that makes his lip curl involuntarily in fear. There is no smell of rabbit or field mouse in the undergrowth; not even a bird breaks the silence with its chirps. The entire thicket is deserted of animal life, and it is making Interceptor terribly, cringingly afraid. He hides behind his master's legs and slinks along the ground, bushy tail tucked between his legs, prick-ears flattened against the long, wide skull. Where his master goes he will follow, but that does not mean he cannot hope his master will turn aside and go another way, somewhere where trees do not stand in stifling rows to block out the light and good air from man and beast alike._

_They pass through tangled trails choked with briars and thorny vines, making their way further and further southward until at last a clearing is reached, a dilapidated train platform appearing as if by magic, flanked by string upon string of rusting, broken-down passenger cars. Interceptor's pupils widen with terror and it is all the wolfling can do to keep himself from fleeing back in the opposite direction, yipping like a whipped cur. This is where the menace flows from, the font of all the fear and unease he has been feeling since the party left the plains and resumed their journey under the overhanging branches and greying moss of the phantom woods. There are Bad Things lurking inside those disintegrating hulks, Bad Things that want to hurt Master and take him far away, and Interceptor snarls in fear and protective anger at these unseen foes. He places himself firmly in the pathway between his owner and the train and whimpers softly, pleading with the black-clad man to go no further. If the human understands he gives no sign of it; he pushes onwards past the dog and there is nothing Interceptor can do but follow._

_The closer they get the greater the menace grows, until Interceptor is almost crawling along the ground in dread. His master stops on the platform and talks with the big man and the other who smells of despair for a moment; there are eyes and white faces watching huddled from the windows, but no-one seems to notice them but the dog. He shows a snowy expanse of glistening fangs and rumbles a warning growl low in his chest, but the faces do not move or change expression and continue to throng behind the broken panes, silent and menacing and translucent. The big man throws open the door and disappears into the darkness, followed unwillingly by the sad, nervous man with the whiskers on his lip. Soon the only living creatures left outside the train are Interceptor and his master, the car doors flung wide before them like the waiting throat of some ravenously hungry demon._

_Once again the wolf-dog looks up at the beloved face and whines, slanted yellow eyes begging his master not to do this. The man finally notices his pet's fear and crouches down on his haunches until the two are eye-to-eye, scratching Interceptor in the downy-soft fur behind one vast ear. Under his owner's comforting hand the black dog calms, both ears pricking forward to catch the softly-spoken words as they leave the Master's lips._

_"Good boy, Interceptor, there's a good fellow. Come now."_

_And with that the dark man rises to his feet and enters the train. Interceptor hesitates for only a brief second on the threshold before trotting into the darkness, close at his master's heels._

_---_

When she was around six or seven years old, knee-high to a cricket and just as noisy, Relm managed to convince every other child in Thamasa that there was a witch who lived in the abandoned, run-down mansion just outside of town. The previous owners had vacated one day without warning, leaving all their belongings inside, and ever since the estate had been observed by the locals with a mix of wariness and superstitious awe. No-one tried to salvage the goods the ex-tenants had left behind; no-one ever dared. The lawn grew shaggy and unkempt, and one by one the windows were broken by vandals or the weather.

Years went by, and, as all abandoned places do, the mansion attracted the attention and curiosity of the local children, Relm foremost among them. On hot summer evenings, when the air was stale with pollen and listing shadows, they would gather at a safe distance and peer through the fence, taking turns at guessing what catastrophe could have driven the occupants away in such a hurry and what sorts of beasties might possibly lurk inside now. Several said they had seen ghosts flitting past the windows, but Relm scoffed at these poor imaginations, insisting that there was no such thing. Instead she wove the gruesome, hair-raising tale of a shape-shifting witch who harvested children's livers for her voodoo spells, and told her story with such relish and aplomb that every boy and girl present believed it. When they broke up to return to their homes there was no lingering in the dusk, and the children travelled in groups of twos and threes if they possibly could.

There were two things Relm would always remember about that mansion, two things that embedded themselves in her mind space and refused to be evicted. One was the smell that lingered around the place, like a musty, soured old bedsheet left heaped in a barn for too long, and the other was the noise – or lack thereof. The house was eerily quiet; not a pigeon or a popper had stirred in all that expanse of mouldering fabric and decaying drywall. It had been unsettling to the extreme.

The atmosphere around Doma Castle was almost exactly the same. An oppressive silence hung over the ivy-cracked walls of the old fortress, a stillness that didn't quite belong. Birds and lizards and insects should have been about in abundance in a place like this, and yet it was as silent as a tomb for miles around, as far as the castle's shadow lay. It was no wonder the locals thought it haunted; it gave Relm, standing warily several hundred yards away, the heebie-jeebies and a bad case of goosebumps. She didn't believe in ghosts and hauntings and all that stuff, not with magic gone – once you were dead you were pretty much dead nowadays – but there was still something bizarre about the town._Something_ was just not quite right.

Relm loved exploring places that weren't quite right.

"You think anyone's bothered to look around this place since the Imperials left?"

Interceptor swivelled his ears to catch her words, making a small _whuf _sound deep down in his chest. Relm skipped ahead several feet and turned to face him, hands on hips.

"Well, _I _don't think anyone has. C'mon, let's go check it out."

---

Relm knew all about the tragedy of Doma. Her teammate Cyan had lost both wife and son in the massacre, along with his king and every companion the swordsman had ever known since childhood. He had never said a word to her about it, and she had never pushed the issue, understanding some things were better left to the past; it was only now that the full horror of what Kefka had wrought was made clear to her, here in the echoing, empty ghost town that had once been the bustling centre of an entire kingdom. There had been many horrors visited upon the peoples of the world during those dark days three years before – entire continents ripped asunder, towns wantonly and indiscriminately blasted with lightning and hellfire by an insane demi-god – but none quite so shocking to Relm as this, the extinction of an entire culture in one fell swoop. Settlers might move into the area someday as they had in other parts of the recovering land, but few, if any, would be native Domans; that race had been wiped from future history as cleanly as chalk from a slate. The river was unfit to drink from even now, a dead and almost stagnant stream of coffee-black water running sluggishly underneath the castle's crumbling foundations.  
_  
_The marketplace was as deserted as the rest of the city, weeds and tufts of rank grass pushing their way up in clumps through the once neat cobblestones of the town centre. Where once the shouts of merchants hawking exotic fruits and fine Doman steel had rung  
out, there was now no sound but the quiet footfalls of the girl and her dog. Where sheep-herders and chocobo-ranchers had driven their bleating, braying beasts to market nothing stirred but the wind. There _was_ life here, but it seemed strictly relegated to spiders and dirt-daubers, busy building their nests on the rotting fences and forgotten windowsills and even the very walls of the outer fortifications themselves.

At this time of day shadows were beginning to gather in the corners of the square, and that, combined with both the sepulchral tone of the entire city and the vast, hollow emptiness of the ruins, made it quite an intimidating place indeed. Relm was a brave girl, sometimes foolishly so, but even she shrank closer to Interceptor and trod softly, clinging to the dog's thick black ruff with slender, slightly sweaty fingers. It was like visiting a church … or a cemetery. The solemnity of it all suddenly landed on her back like a physical weight, demanding respect and silence.

They walked underneath an archway and through several more overgrown courtyards before reaching the gates of the actual castle itself, where both wings hung off their iron-wrought hinges at crazy, impossible angles. The once-impressive, almost vertical staircase leading to the royal palace was reduced to rubble in several spots; the earthquakes and tremors that had come with the reshifting of the continents had severely damaged what the Imperial troops previously stationed there had not. Interceptor had no trouble springing up and past the piles of debris, but Relm had to claw and fight her way over them, scraping her palms and knees bloody on the jagged blocks of broken marble. She spat and swore and thought about turning around more than once, but sheer stubbornness drove her onwards towards the castle, determined to see what lay behind the rotting doors.

"I … _really _need to get in better shape," Relm wheezed as she pulled herself up the final step to the landing. Interceptor had sat watching her from the top the entire way; she would've sworn blind the dog was laughing at her even now, tongue lolling out merrily. His eyes fairly danced with mischief. "Oh shut _up,_ Crap Breath. Just lucky … you've got … four legs, you big jerk."

The two continued on with only a little hesitation at the great doorway. Relm had an overpowering fear of creepy-crawly things (caterpillars mostly, although she never would have admitted it – if Gau ever found this out Relm was pretty sure she would just curl up and _die_, if she didn't kill him dead first), and the sight of all the cobwebs made her slightly nervous. Still, they had come this far … She steeled herself and pushed onwards into the interior darkness of the castle, dancing nervously around the broken web-wisps blowing in the wind. It was dark, and musty, and there was a layer of dust you could write your name in on pretty much every surface, but at least there was light filtering through the grimy windows. Enough light to see any lurking spiders by, anyhow.

And thus began Relm's afternoon of exploration. The castle was huge and of a grand architecture no longer seen in that rapidly changing world, a stone labyrinth of dim passageways and open gardens and mattresses silently mouldering away in their dank little chambers. She looked upon this forgotten place with silent fascination - the empty nursery with its forgotten toys, the servants chambers that would never be scrubbed again, the ivy climbing in through the cracked windows to reclaim what had once been the earth's – and while she kept a kind of quiet, reverential respect for the massiveness of it all and the lives that had been disrupted there, nothing she came across really seemed to surprise or interest her. Creepy castle, sure, but not especially fascinating.

Until, at the end of a long series of mazelike halls, she found the throne room. Here she stopped in shock, inhaling so loudly Interceptor glanced up at her questioningly.

The hall was as long and as high as a good-sized house, almost completely empty save for a fireplace set in one of the walls and a dust-coated throne sitting directly opposite it. Skylights in the ceiling far above illuminated the lonely scene – the throne, the fireplace, a broken-down pile of splinters that might have been something resembling a table once upon a time – but these objects weren't what made Relm gasp. It was what was on the _walls _that made her sharply take in her breath, one hand pressed to her gaping mouth.

"Holy _shit," _she finally whispered, with the gravitas of a monk quoting sacred writ.

All castles generally had murals in their throne rooms, paintings of conquest over rival nations or the acts of mighty kings. The moving fortress of the Figaro Kingdom, for example, had a great sweeping fresco of an ant-lion hunt, one of the family's oldest and most widely known traditions. But the decorations within the royal chambers of Doma Castle were more than just big portraits for making the royalty look impressive – they were some of the most detailed, beautiful works of art Relm had ever seen, outstripping anything that good-natured tub of lard Owzer had ever shown her. There were samurais at battle, their armour and weapons detailed to an incredible degree. There were lovely, demure maidens. There were roe deer at play, and wild hunts, and the sea teeming with life.

This was Art with a capital A. Relm walked around the room with the awestruck expression of a pilgrim at a holy shrine, gently touching the decorated plaster with timid reverence. Her bootsteps echoed hollowly through the chamber, stirring up tiny puffs of dust underneath her feet like smoke from a grass-fire. Already some of the paint was flaking away, the elements slowly undoing what the greatest artists of the kingdom had probably laboured at for years uncounted. Eventually it would all be gone, and nobody would ever know it had been there, save maybe Cyan and a handful of others. Unless …

Relm reached for her sketchbook, plopped down in a swathe of sunlight, and began to rapidly sketch. Interceptor stood looking about warily before settling back down on his haunches beside her, nose and ears constantly on-guard for a threat he could not pinpoint.

When Relm started sketching – _really _going at it, the tip of her pencil a grey blur on the parchment - she pretty much zoned out to any and everything around her. The world narrowed down to the subject and the drawing, and so it really wasn't surprising in the least that she didn't notice the sun disappearing from the skylight until it hindered her from finishing her drawing. By the time she looked up the room was growing dim, a sudden, chill darkness growing around the edges. If the throne room had been shadowy in some places before, it was as black as the pit now.

_Goddesses damn it, of all the stupid luck, _she thought, glancing around in dismay. _How am I supposed to go back down all those windy little hallways and the blasted staircase in the dark? I'll break my neck! I'll get lost! Relm, you idiot …_

Her eyes hurt from the strain of staring at the sketchpad, and her butt wasn't in much better shape after sitting on that dusty stone floor for so long, either. She was too tired and too annoyed to try and find the way back out, so instead she grabbed an old throw rug, shook the dust out until it popped (making Interceptor sneeze repeatedly in the process), and went to sleep right there on the ground, head pillowed on her pack.

Interceptor stayed awake beside her for much longer, his eyes searching the dark. When he finally followed Relm into dreams it was with one ear cocked towards the encroaching darkness, wary and intent for any sound or movement.

The two travellers slept deep, unnaturally deep, and as they did so they dreamed.

---

_He dreams of his old master, the one long before the man in black, the one who smelled of machinery and death. The man lived in a village with many other men who dressed exactly the same as he, and for most of the day they would loiter about, tossing square white pieces of bone on the ground in a game that all the identical men seemed to find very entertaining indeed. When they weren't doing this they would go in one of the big houses and drink a foul-tasting liquid that smelled almost as bad as it tasted. Interceptor's master especially enjoyed this way of passing the time, and when he had been inside the big house for some while, it often seemed as though he had trouble walking when next the dog saw him._

_Most of the time the man simply ignored Interceptor, but sometimes when he drank a lot of the stuff and came out staggering he would try to beat him. Interceptor would snarl and show his fangs and cringe away, but the lead chain the man kept him staked on next to their tent always kept him from running away. He had put his teeth to the chain on many a long night, but it would not give. Interceptor was stuck._

_If it was an especial occasion in the village his master would take Interceptor to a big square cage on the outskirts of town, where many of the identically-clad men gathered. Some of them even came on huge two-legged machines that clanked and hooted and stank of oil and hot metal; these towering giants gave Interceptor nightmares for many years after he had left the village and gone to better places with much kinder masters. When enough of the men had gathered the master would shove Interceptor into the makeshift ring, and there he would fight one of his own kind, usually to the death. Interceptor's owner had caught him in the wild when he was not much more than a pup, and his wolf's blood gave him a size and a fierceness the other dogs simply could not withstand. He moved like a whirlwind made of snapping, slashing teeth and yellow eyes, fighting for his very life against every kind of canine imaginable. The men would cry his name and pump their fists in the air from start till finish, when Interceptor's opponent lay gasping his or her life out in the dust and he stood panting, weary but triumphant.  
_  
_Things went on like this for what seemed a very long time, until one day during a routine beating Interceptor's life took a rapid and unexpected change. The man had been drinking and was as wobbly as a newborn buffalax, almost unable to draw back his foot to give Interceptor a kick without toppling to the ground below. He was giving it his best shot anyway, and had just taken another swing when out of nowhere there appeared a woman, gripping the man's arm while frantically crying out in a loud voice. She was fair-haired and did not smell like a native of the village; none of the villagers had ever stepped in to stop Interceptor from being whipped before. The man had pushed the slightly-built woman out of the way easily and continued his assault with renewed fury, kicking the injured Interceptor again and again in the ribs until each touch was like a red-hot blossom of pain in his sides and flanks. He continued to snarl stubbornly at the man, but his protests were getting weaker and weaker with every blow that fell._

_In the real world, outside the veil of pain, the woman had risen from the ground and done something Interceptor could never fathom. She had raised her hands, spoken a few words in an angry tongue, and before dog or man knew what was what Interceptor's old master was lying prone in the street, unconscious from a lightning bolt that had descended out of a clear blue sky. With that done she turned her attention to Interceptor himself, chanting over the injured wolf-dog in the same language until his wounds were healed and he could once again stand on his own. The two had left the man where he lay in the street, and from that day onward Interceptor had never left the woman's side, guarding her in the little isolated village they dwelt in until the day she died._

_This is not what happens in the dream._

_The woman rises to speak the words that will send the man to the gutter, lifting her hands in that same strange gesture Interceptor recalls, but she does not make it in time, and the man turns and kicks her squarely in the stomach. Even as she is falling Interceptor has leapt for the man's throat in a rage, but the man is no longer a man. He is a great two-legged machine, taller than the tallest building or tree, and with one of his great clawed feet he stomps down upon the woman's body, crushing her underneath with a sickening pop. The man-machine grinds her body down until the sound of bones and ligaments snapping are all Interceptor can hear in his ears, and the dog howls in anguish, a sobbing wail he has only made once before in waking life._

_The machine is transforming again, this time into the winged, white-faced man-beast he and his master and the others fought and defeated so long ago. It holds the girl in one claw and his black-clad master in the other, and as it squeezes the life out of them it laughs at Interceptor, laughs as it clutches his gods until blood pours out of their mouths and eyes in bright red streams of gore. It lifts a mountain-sized wing and is preparing to smash Interceptor himself when, at last, he awakens with a start._

_---_

_  
Relm dreams too, tossing and thrashing in her sleep. She dreams of that fateful day when the Blackjack was ripped in half like a piece of rice paper, scattering its passengers willy-nilly across the landscape like toy soldiers shaken out of a container. Shadow had grabbed hold of her collar as she fell – she remembers this clearly, and how even in that moment of panic it seemed strange he would go to such trouble to save her – but it had been a futile gesture; seconds later the half of the airship they were clinging to had come to pieces and the ninja lost his grip. The world had rushed up to meet her in a blur of green and brown, blackness swallowing the girl's consciousness seconds before she hit the treeline. When Relm woke up she was hanging from a tree-branch by her sash, and the land around her had changed forever. _

_This is not what happens in the dream._

_She is clinging to the falling wreckage for dear life_, _reaching out over a widening chasm with one desperate hand_ _to grab her mother while holding onto a plank with the other. Mother's fingers are outstretched and Relm is inches away from grasping them when the section of the ship the older woman is riding comes apart. She drops like a stone, blonde hair fluttering outstretched around her face in a halo as she falls away towards the earth, and Relm screams and screams but there is nothing she can do but watch as the upturned eyes grow more and more distant. The screams are still leaving her throat when Relm's piece also disintegrates and she begins to fall. _

_There are no trees to catch her this time._

_---_

_  
_

Relm awoke to darkness and the sound of Interceptor roaring like an angry bull, his half-crazed barks echoing deafeningly loud through the great hall. Waking up to a crazy-mad dog in a pitch-black room was bad enough, but it held an added terror for Relm: she had never, ever, _ever _heard Interceptor bark like this, not since the day of Kefka's defeat. Whatever had started him off had to be bad - _really _bad. The thought sent a chill through her aching body, goosebumps prickling on her arms and legs. She sat up and peered into the dim.

There was just enough light leaking through the skylights from the stars and moon to paint the room with a kind of low, watery illumination. It took Relm's eyes a moment to adjust to it; when they finally did, she saw an impossible scene playing out before her.

Interceptor was standing between her and one of the corners, still snarling and barking with that crazed intensity she had woken up to. Every hair on his body was fluffed out and at attention, the fur around his ruff splattered with flecks of saliva. He looked like a mad thing, a devil. And what had raised Interceptor's ire to such a terrible level? What had made him go seemingly insane with fear and rage, out there in the dark? A demon, perhaps? A monster that had wandered in looking for shelter?

A little boy, no older than seven, lay curled in the crook of the wall, knees pulled firmly to his chest. He wore knee-length shorts, and even in the dim non-light of the throne hall Relm could tell he was of a dark complexion, black-haired and dusky. A neat little cap was perched on his head, and he looked perfectly healthy, not abandoned or scared in the slightest. In fact, his face seemed rather _blank _for a small child lost in a giant castle with a wolf threatening to eat his face off. The only emotion in his eyes was a languid, dreamy confusion, as if he were sleepwalking. He was staring right through Interceptor like the dog wasn't even there.

Relm didn't know why, but _something_ about the kid made the hairs on her head prickle straight up. A wave of nausea swept over her; she shook it off and rose to her feet, trying to ignore the unsettled feeling she got every time she looked at him.

"He-hey, kid-- Interceptor, shut _up, _for the Goddesses's sakes, it's just a little boy – are you alright? How the heck did you get in here?"

She managed to somehow get the words out past the lump developing in her throat, but the boy barely even looked in her direction. Thinking maybe he was just shy or scared (and who wouldn't be in such a situation?), Relm walked a few steps closer and spoke again, hesitantly but louder this time.

"Really, it's okay; I won't let the dog hurt you. He's harmless. Where are your parents? Are you alright? Did you get lost?" And more to herself, "…Are you a mute?"

The boy slowly raised his head and looked up at her, his blank expression giving way to a vague uneasiness. He mouthed something that looked like it could have been "Father", but his voice was far too quiet for Relm to hear, even in the ringing silence of the abandoned castle. Without warning, he rolled over on his side and began to retch, vomiting a dark brown liquid onto the flagstones of the floor. The heaving rose in intensity until the child was convulsing and bucking in painful jerks, foam and bile frothing from between his clenched jaws. Relm tried to go to him – she _had _to help, the poor kid was fucking dying right in front of her – but Interceptor threw himself between his mistress and the strange boy before she could take two steps forward, knocking her clear off her feet and hard onto the cobblestones.

She scrambled back up, ready to give Interceptor the worst name-calling she had ever laid on _anyone. _If that kid _died_ because of his weirdness, she would …

Wait. Where was the kid?

Relm had never doubted her own sanity, mainly because she had never had a reason to. She had a fierce, imaginative spirit, sure, but she sure as hell wasn't prone to hallucinations or demented fits of any kind. So why then, if she wasn't _losing her damned mind, _had she just seen a little boy as real as herself foaming and jerking on the floor at her feet? And where had he gone? Where was the liquid he had vomited up? _What the hell was going on? _

A dull, rasping cough came from the hallway opposite the throne room. It was joined by others, a multitude of voices hacking and gasping wetly in pain. Some sounded like they were screaming, or trying to scream, through choking throatfuls of … something. The voices got louder, and closer, until they were right outside the doorway and Relm thought she was going to wet her trousers in panic. A hand emerged from the darkness, pale and insubstantial, and …

Relm didn't realize she was running until she was halfway down the darkened corridor, Interceptor sprinting beside her with his ears flattened in fear. Somehow they managed to find their way out of the labyrinth of hallways in the dark, and even more miraculously Relm cleared the stairs without slipping once, leaping over debris and rubble like a terror-stricken gazelle. Fear gave them wings, and they flew all the way through the abandoned city and out the gateway, back onto the plains where the night sky stretched crystal clear overhead.

They spent the rest of the dark hours huddled together in bleary-eyed watchfulness, neither willing to turn their backs on the looming shadow of the castle for even a second.

"You know what?" she said to Interceptor, just before the sun rose and they both fell back into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. "_Fuck _ghosts."


	9. IX

_

IX

_

Nikeah was a big, bustling harbour town, with enough colour and excitement and hedonism to fill a city five times its size. People in the surrounding villages called it a den of vice and villainy, Ifrit's Playpen, and the fact that it had barely been touched at all during the Days of Destruction did nothing to dissuade them of this notion. It was full of merry dancing whores with rouged cheeks and flared skirts, lusty sailors from Maranda and South Figaro and Tzen, and merchants, more merchants than any other city on the planet. The open-air market drew them like flies, and like flies they buzzed to and fro in the heavy salt air, plying their wares to anyone passing by with tenacity not unlike a bogy suffering from lockjaw.

It was a loud, colourful, treacherous place, where the smells of heavy perfume and cloying incense mingled with fish-stink and iodine and the musty aroma of chocobo feathers from the livestock pens just off the docks. There were many strange sights to behold in Nikeah, fearful and fanciful both, but one of the biggest attractions the city had to offer – besides the market and the brothels, of course – was nothing more than a simple wooden sign advertising the ferry that ran to South Figaro.

To look at the thing you wouldn't have thought there was anything spectacularly important about it. Four splintery boards had been hastily nailed together to create a notice board, and the ferryman – he had a name, Silas Gill, but everyone else had long since forgotten it – had painstakingly inscribed his message on it in runny red paint. In shaky, scrawling letters it announced to all passing travellers that:

**FERRY DOCKS _HERE_!  
Nikeah to South Figaro  
150g One-Way  
200g Round-Trip  
_Stowaways will be Summarily Executed!_**

**  
**The ferryman was chest-burstingly proud of his sign. He wasn't sure what exactly 'summarily' meant, but damned if it didn't look professional, so on it stayed. 

Of course, this wasn't what had made his sign so famous all over Nikeah (even if he thought it should've); _that_ was another tale entirely, one the ferryman was ever eager to tell. All the unfortunate passer-by had to do was look sideways at the crooked sign on its listing plank and he was off, relating the story of how _his_ sign – his, the very one right there _he_ had painted – had saved a child's life once during the World Cataclysm.

The tale went something like this. On that fateful day when Kefka re-arranged the statues and brought the world to its knees, the resulting earthquakes and shifting plates caused massive tsunamis, great waves that roiled over the coastal cities, flooding buildings and sweeping away bystanders as they went. Through a stroke of good fortune there was no major damage in Nikeah (more fuel for those who said it was under the protection of Ifrit), but the floodwaters _did_ manage to wash away both the ferryman's sign and several children, all of whom unfortunately drowned save one. The survivor rescued himself by grabbing onto the first solid piece of driftwood that passed him by, which also happened to be the ferry sign.

Word went 'round of the miraculous save, and people flocked from every corner of the area to see the bit of plywood that had snatched the boy from death's jaws. The ferryman became near unbearable to be around, claiming a hundred times a day that it was _his _divine hands that had wrought the miracle board. When he wasn't busy boasting, he was strutting around with a hideous look of triumph on his face, puffed out like a leathery and slightly red-faced balloon. People bought him endless drinks in the local pub to congratulate him on constructing such a fine piece of work, until it was a wonder he could pilot the ferry safely at all.

Today was turning out much the same as always. Several sailors from Kohlingen had offered him a round or three, and he had accepted their generosity with good-natured geniality. Then a boatload of Marandans did the same, and a rich merchant from Figaro, until before long the ferryman was in very high spirits indeed. He stood by his sign, proud as a chocobo cob in the spring, watching the crowds roll by with a beatific smile on his lips and a bottle of Tzen whiskey in his hand. Life was good.

By this point it wouldn't have shocked or disturbed the good man if a parade of polka-dotted moogles had come sambaing out of his trousers, so it was small surprise he barely noticed the little girl standing impatiently in front of his establishment at first. When he finally managed to focus both eyes on her he saw nothing more important than yet another street urchin, one of several thousand that had swarmed the alleys of Nikeah after the world cataclysm, and gave the child no further attention. This was a mistake.

He turned his back for a moment to idly check the clock tower. When he swung around again he found his sign ripped off its moorings, the remains carefully snapped and splintered into pieces so small he would never be able to glue them back together.

The shrill scream the ferryman let out had dogs barking as far south as Albrook.

---

It never failed: just when you thought things couldn't fuck themselves up any more without causing some sort of cataclysmic implosion, they went and one-upped you, just to show they could. Some blamed it on chance, others on an unlucky star. Relm, as usual, blamed it on Stray, whom she had decided must _really _hate dog-owners.

They had dragged into Nikeah late in the afternoon, Relm wanting nothing more than to find a decent inn and collapse in the kind of slightly-grimy-but-none-the-less-better-than-camping luxury only a second-rate public house could afford. Her first warning that things might not go quite according to plan had come as soon as she and Interceptor set foot into the first establishment, encouragingly named _The Quilt and Larder._

"Don't allow dogs!" the man at the counter had barked, glaring malevolently over his spectacles at the pair. Relm begged, pleaded, cajoled, and when none of that worked, said something to the effect that it was a good thing the innkeeper's _father _hadn't been so goddamned picky, which would have usually resulted in a fight but in this case (Mr. Innkeeper was not in the habit of tackling little girls, especially not little girls with big fuck-off wolves as companions) merely caused said innkeeper to threaten immediate legal action if she didn't get out. It all went downhill from there.

Almost exactly the same scenario played itself out at the _Crab and Pickle_, the_ Lobster Coach, _and even the _Wolf's Teat. _Inns weren't picky about whom they boarded, but an underage female with what appeared to be a half-feral dog at her side was just a little too much, even for the shadiest of sailor's dens. Halfway to the _Blood and Cuspid _they passed the ferry landing, and Relm got her first good look at how much the trip to South Figaro was going to cost. Snapping the sign in half like a dry branch relieved _some _of her anger, but not enough to really matter in the long run.

Even the cheapest, most rat-infested of hostels charged somewhere around the 140 gil range for a night's stay. Passage on the ferry was 150. It didn't take a maths whiz to figure out the problem with that when all you had in your purse was 151 gil and a fast-growing brood of lint bunnies. The world 'fuck' did not begin to adequately describe Relm's feelings on this particular matter, but she said it anyway, slowly and loudly and with plenty of venom. She hadn't _known _that there wasn't that much gold, hadn't known supplies and an oversized second-hand cloak would take that big of a chunk out of her savings five months before, but what was done was done. All she could do about it now was swear, and so she did, sitting in a fast-darkening alleyway behind _The Cat's Boots _with her head in her hands, stunned and unsure of what to do next.

There was still enough for the ferry – if barely – but it was going to mean sleeping rough for yet another night until morning came and the boat began to run once more. Relm didn't even have the money to buy a loaf of bread or an apple in the meantime, and she was fucking _hungry_, dammit. They had been living off dried fish since Doma Channel, but even that had dried up two days before Nikeah came in sight. Forty-eight hours without food does strange things to a person's endurance; since Relm was already strange, it merely made her cranky, and desperate for something to eat.

The alleyway was filled with smells wafting from the pubs and local street vendors. It was a Saturday, the busiest day of the week for food-sellers, and the air positively reeked of grilled meats and fresh-baked bread and the slightly stale aroma of spilled beer. Interceptor sniffed the heady scents, smacked his chops appreciatively, and then turned his gaze to Relm, whining softly. She looked back at him blankly, wondering what it was exactly Interceptor thought she could do. How exactly did you explain to a dog that you were broke? And did he _always_ have to be so trusting of her? It was downright nerve-wracking sometimes.

"Look, I don't _have _any money, boy, I'm sorry. No money, no food,_ capisce_? We're just gonna have to hold out a little longer, but I promise I'll make Edgar give you a big juicy steak when we get there. The biggest."

He cocked his head slightly and whined louder, still staring intently at her face.

"No, I mean it. There is _nothing I can do. _I—Goddesses, how am I supposed to make you understand?"

Those sad eyes! They were _boring into her soul. _Relm sighed and threw up her hands in exasperation.

"FINE. I will find you some food, just don't look so _sad, _okay? Sheesh. You almost make me feel like I have a conscience." She got to her feet and scrutinized the alley, looking for something she obviously expected to be there. There was almost always one behind the pubs … ah-_ha_. Relm's nose wrinkled involuntarily, but with another long-suffering sigh she stripped off her cloak and scarf and approached the garbage crate, filled with stoic resolve. It had to be done, so fuck it, might as well get it over with before she had time to think about just what she was doing. _The things I do for that mutt._

The trash bin was a huge wooden structure, roughly the size of a grand piano, and it was packed to the brim with refuse and garbage from the _Cat's Boots. _Old chicken bones, the leavings of half-eaten chowder, stale bread, soured milk and rotten vegetables – it was all thrown out into the big cedar receptacle, where the morass sat and stewed for a time until the garbage men came and hauled it away in their wagons. Since they only rolled through once a week, the mess had plenty of time to ferment into a perfectly noxious concoction, with a smell that could render one unconscious at fifty paces. Luckily this bin seemed to have been emptied not long before, but it still had a mighty reek to it.

Relm had not grown up an aristocrat, nor did she have any pretensions of snobbery about her. People that put on airs made her roll her eyes, and money was best when it was being used for buying new paints or a garishly colourful hat. Still, there was _something _inside the girl that made her occasionally lean towards the more upper-crust side of life, with its fashion and art and exciting operatic diversions, and under the tutelage of people like Setzer and Owzer this part of her had flourished over the past several years. A war raged within Relm's psyche now as she hovered beside the bins, the aristocratic part of her crying out against the sheer _ickiness _of picking through a garbage tip for food. Did she _really _want to stoop this low? Couldn't Interceptor just wait a little while longer?

Then she thought: _what would Sally do in this situation? _and the answer became clear. With a deep breath Relm rolled up her sleeves, mounted the side of the bin, and without any further hesitation plunged her arms elbow-deep into the refuse, holding her disgust in check as she rooted around for something edible. Most of the stuff was pretty gross, but she _did_ manage to find one or two dainties that would probably satisfy a dog just fine, including what looked like a perfectly intact fried pie. Relm grabbed these tidbits and hurried back to Interceptor, relieved and just a little bit proud of herself for going through with it.

She slumped against the stone wall of the pub and watched her friend snap up the bits of meat and stale cheese with a smile. He was a good companion. It was worth the trouble and the stink when she received such unerring loyalty in return. The fried pie Relm had saved for herself, and with barely any hesitation at all she broke it in half and took a bite, squeamishness overpowered by hunger. If it was good enough for Interceptor it was good enough for her … well, _most_ of the time, anyway. Chocobo turds weren't exactly Relm's idea of a good after-dinner chaser, as crazy about them as Interceptor seemed.

He finished the scraps and turned back towards Relm with a gratefully wagging tail, trying to lick her grimy face affectionately. Usually she just laughed and pushed him away when this happened, but this time she felt a sudden burst of appreciation for his friendship and threw her arms around the shaggy neck, giving him a big bear hug. Interceptor sat solemnly through this mauling, letting the girl squeeze him without protest. Anyone else that tried to manhandle him in such a fashion would soon be on their way to the nearest doctor with a slashed-open arm or worse, but _this_ … this was the girl.

Interceptor loved every minute of it.

---

When she got up the next morning Relm was in no mood to piss around. Sleeping rough in alleyways, she had decided, was something she was going to try and avoid entirely for the rest of her life, even if it meant robbing every train from Tzen to Albrook. Setzer had been right: there was something to be said for being incredibly stinking rich.

The ferryman's expression showed no recognization as Relm paid him the last of her gold, but immediately contorted into a paroxysm of fear and anger when he saw the monstrous shape standing placidly beside her. He wound up for a bellow.

"We don't allo—"

Before the rest of the words could leave his tongue there was a small, surprisingly strong fist gripping the front of his collar, pulling his face down to a lower level. Relm glared balefully into his bloodshot eyes, ferocious blue versus blurry crimson.

"I swear to Maduin, if the phrase 'we don't allow dogs' comes outta your mouth I will set fire to your stubble, let my puppy chew on your butt, and toss you in the harbour. Okay? And then I'll paint a naked lady on your boat, just because."

She only came up to the ferryman's belt-buckle and was made up of knees and elbows and grime; a good strong wind could have blown her away. Still, there was something iron-strong in this slight little girl, something that scared the ferryman even more than her huge black dog. There was desperation written over every inch of her sallow-cheeked face, and it frightened him to an embarrassing extent.

"G-g'wan then," he finally muttered, unable to meet that icy look any longer. She released his shirt and stomped over the gangplank with her pet, tiny and furious.

No-one else bothered the two of them for the duration of their ferry ride.


	10. X

_

X

  
_  
The sandy-haired boy named Cap – that was what his mum had called him, anyway, but her face and voice were fading from his memory more and more as time passed – was used to seeing strange sights in his favoured haunts around the Figaro Trainyards. It was the only working railway line in the world now, the tracks and cars salvaged from the abandoned state of Doma two years before for the express purpose of building a safe shipping route through the desert to Figaro Castle, and as such the place got an awful lot of visitors coming from distant lands to see this new and exciting mechanical wonder with their own eyes. They were easy to spot, with their over-awed expressions and strange clothes, and even easier to target if you were careful and quick and slippery enough. Cap was, and he did very well for himself lifting money-pouches from the easily distracted and (to his mind) stupid people who thronged the streets of South Figaro, paying no attention to their surroundings or the little boy with his hand halfway down their pockets. If they were going to be _that _dumb they didn't deserve the money anyway, that's what he thought. He'd had a lot of time to think about it, sleeping in damp alleyways and the doorways of pubs and packing crates when it rained, and quite frankly he didn't care if _they_ thought it was wrong. _They_ had never fought the rats for a crust of bread or knocked another kid over the head to steal a mouldy apple, so _they _didn't have any say in the matter. Whenever the guards managed to grab him he always caught hell and a beating, but the temporary discomfort wasn't enough to deter the boy for long. Hunger was a greater master than boot or cane. _  
_  
But even with four years of long experience behind him, four years of pinching pennies from anyone and everyone who crossed his path, this new mark was a strange and baffling source of interest. Other children living on the streets were no new thing; there were throngs of boys and girls competing for space and food, most of them orphans from when the world went awry. This girl was different though, so far out of the leagues of the matchstick-girls and flower-sellers and petty purse-grabbers she might as well have been on another planet entirely. That wasn't gonna stop Cap from taking what he could get from her as soon as he got close enough to do so, but it did interest him a great deal. Cap liked interesting people, even when he was running away from them with a handful of gold pieces clutched tightly in his palm.

He had been following her since she wandered into one of the alleyways near the train station, leaning on a vicious-looking black dog for support. It looked more like a wolf than any dog Cap had ever seen, but why would a teenage girl be carting around a wolf? Cap had decided it must be an exceptionally mean-looking dog and turned his attention to the worn leather pack the girl wore over her shoulders. She was a dirty, tattered thing, her clothes covered with trail-dust and sweat and unidentifiable stains, but with a satchel that nice she must have had money at _some _point. Hopefully some of it was still inside the parcel, within easy reach of Cap's grasping, lightning-quick fingers. He edged closer as they moved towards the switching yards, the crowds thinning out just enough to give him space to run if he needed it. Perfect.

The girl paused to look about her, obviously confused as to where she should go next, and in that moment of indecision Cap struck and struck fast. A knot of people closed in around the mark and Cap followed, bumping almost imperceptibly into the girl's back while she was trying to get her bearings straight. In a matter of seconds he had thrust a grimy hand deep into the satchel, grabbed what felt like some kind of jewellery, and was well away before she even had time turn around. From a safe distance he watched the girl continue to wander aimlessly about with that confused expression on her face – were those _red _boots she was wearing? How weird – before slipping back off to the dank little close he called home to examine the loot he'd just pilfered.

Cap's route back to the nest was a headlong zig-zag through the crowds and markets of Figaro, with plenty of backtracks and false starts just in case he was being followed. The street urchin knew South Figaro better than even its architects; when you lived on the byways and streets of a city you tended to map it out in your head, marking every warm grate and hidey-hole with a mental red checkmark. No-one noticed the undersized boy in the scruffy driver's cap darting past them and no-one ever did, but Cap had known others who let their guard down and woke up to bigger, meaner boys sitting on their chests with switchblades, demanding money and worse. It cost nothing to be cautious, so cautious he was.

Soon he was back at the hideout, a tiny corridor barely wider than a hallway situated behind one of the local pubs. It stank of beer and piss and was littered with piles of dirty hay and packing crates, but it was the only home Cap had known for a very long time, and it sheltered him somewhat from the rain when it decided to fall. He settled back in a sort of cubby-hole between two or three pallets and one of the brick walls, a snug place where he kept his most precious treasures hidden, and studied the necklace lifted from the girl.

It wasn't much, nothing more than a tarnished silver ring looped through a chain. The necklace was poor quality and wouldn't go for much, but the ring could fetch enough to buy a loaf of bread and a bag of bruised apples if he played his cards right. Cap was no mean judge of what would and wouldn't put food in his belly; he lifted the silver ring into the air and examined it carefully as it caught the dim light of the one lantern that hung over the pub's back door. Looked real, felt authentic, and … wait, was there something written on the inside of it? He lifted the piece higher, squinting to make out the engraved words in their flowing script. Mummy had taught him how to read a little, before the ground opened up and swallowed her whole, but that had been a long time ago and his skills were rusty from disuse. It took a lot of puzzling and mouthing the letters over several times to figure out what it meant, but eventually Cap managed to piece together the short sentence and its meaning.

_

T … o … My … B … e …l …o …v…e…d D…a ... u …g…t…e…r…R…e…l…m …F……r…o…m …Y…o…u…r…L…o…v…i…n…g…M…o…t…h…e…r …

_

A gift from mother to daughter. Relm. That must've been the girl's name. _Relm_.

Cap had never felt guilt for his actions before. Guilt had no place on the streets of South Figaro when your stomach was cramping so badly from lack of food you couldn't stand upright, or when the guards would throw you in the oubliettes for so much as looking at a rich adult's retinue. Right and wrong had long ago been lost, engulfed by the earth along with his mother and sisters. But despite all this, despite the hardships and the years that had passed, the ring's words brought to mind the face of his mum, and he guiltily wondered what she would think if she could see him now. He was barely eight years old and he wanted a mum again terribly, although he would never say it aloud or willingly consent to being imprisoned in an orphanage. Would a mum even _want_ him, for that matter? They only liked clean children with well-scrubbed faces, that's what the other kids said. The streets were the only place for him, a bad boy who stole jewellery from girls with bright eyes and shiny red boots.

She was probably gone anyway, and it wasn't like he could return it even if he wanted to. Might as well make some use of it. Cap rose to his feet, trying to shake off the heavy feeling that was suddenly weighing him down. Once it was pawned and out of sight and his belly was full it wouldn't be so bad. To this end the boy decided to start out for the relic shop right then and there, and he was halfway down the alleyway and almost back onto the main thoroughfare when a low growl from the shadows froze him dead in his tracks.

Like the big bad wolf of the stories it was, black and impossibly huge. It blocked the alley with its bulk and seemed to tower over him, a mass of glowing eyes and white teeth and inky fur. Cap instantly recognized it was the girl's dog – although how it had followed his winding course without being spotted he had no idea – but the shadows and the child's imagination and his already nagging guilt all came together to make the dog much more than a simple canine that could be shooed away with rocks like any other stray. In Cap's mind the creature was vengeance incarnate, a supernatural force here to make him pay for the wrong he had wrought on its mistress. The black dog took another step forward, claws clicking on the wet cobblestones of the path, and as it did it growled, lips pulling back to show rows and rows of sharp white teeth. Cap was several seconds away from hysteria, frantically racking his brain for a way out. It was almost like the dog _knew … _A sudden unreasoning impulse to give the beast the necklace struck him, and he fished in his pockets until the cool weight of the chain slipped through his fingers.

Slowly, so as not to enrage the monster further, Cap withdrew the necklace and hesitantly held it out towards the dog. It stopped growling abruptly and peered at the dangling ring, but it did not move any closer to him and Cap wondered what he should do. It had quit growling at the sight of the thing, so maybe …

He took a careful step towards the animal, expecting it to leap forward and tear out his throat at any second. It did not; it merely cocked its huge head and stared at him more intently, making no further noise or move in Cap's immediate direction. Encouraged, the pickpocket moved even closer, until he could see the individual whiskers on the dog's snout and the lamplight glinting in its yellow eyes. It continued to study him carefully but remained stock-still, an ebony statue like the ones that stood at the gates to the city. With trembling hands Cap lowered the chain around the wolf-creature's massive ruff, until it encircled its neck and was almost buried from view in the fur that grew there.

Almost as soon as the act was done the dog wheeled and raced away with the speed of a deer, disappearing as quickly and silently as it had come. The boy fell to his knees in the close and cried for the first time since his mother's death, great wracking child-sobs that shook his entire body. It was all too much, the guilt and the loneliness and the great black dog, and he wished more than anything that he could wake up and be in his little bed in the house that had been swallowed up when the world came apart. This did not happen, and failing to awaken in those happier days, he crawled into one of the hay-strewn packing crates and sucked his thumb until blessed sleep overtook him.

He dreamed of his mummy and his sisters, and of a time that would not return.

---

Relm had been travelling for nearly five months, and in that time Interceptor had never left her side even once, the most overprotective nanny-goat of a creature she had ever come in contact with save maybe Strago. And now, in the middle of a city – while she was stowed away in a _boxcar,_ no less – the silly beast had suddenly and without warning disappeared without a trace, racing off into the crowds before she could stop him. She had run after him yelling fit to burst for several yards, but when Interceptor wanted to go he _went, _and nothing except possibly a racing chocobo could catch up. What in heaven's name had possessed him to do such a stupid thing?

The boxcar was warm and sun-dappled and not a bad place to rest, so Relm had chosen to sit back and wait, sure that Interceptor would return eventually. Then they would ride the train together through the desert to Figaro Castle; _surely_ Edgar would know something about her father's whereabouts if she could haul him away from his kingly duties with the whores for a moment's conversation. She loved the guy like an uncle (a slightly creepy uncle who made lecherous jokes at her expense), but he had an addiction to the ladies that rivalled and even topped Setzer's constant battle with Gamblor, Demon-God of the Dice. What an incorrigible and slightly weird family she had.

A gentle breeze wafted through the open doors of the boxcar, the smells of hay and hot tar and lumber mixing together in Relm's nostrils until she couldn't tell one apart from the other. The warm rays of the sun and the fact that she had been up for nearly twenty-four hours straight wore down the girl's worry for her companion, and very soon her lids had dropped and she was fast asleep and snoring. It was a dreamless sleep, the first real nap Relm had had for some time, and so exhausted was she and so deep was her unconsciousness she never even noticed when the train began to gently move and pick up speed.

The car clattered merrily along on its tracks through the evening and into the night, soon far into the Figaro Desert.


	11. XI

_

XI

  
_  
Deep within her sleep, deep down below the waves where not even dreams followed, Relm could hear the clicking. It was persistent and never seemed to let up, a steady, rhythmic _click-clack _as neatly in time as any metronome ever built. When she _did _dream it invaded her thoughts and made stupid situations occur, dumb things ridiculous even for dream logic.

The metronome was on top of Strago's piano. Relm was five again and she was taking lessons from a dour old maid who lived just up the road, an unlikeable woman who had smelled of mothballs and kept at least four lap dogs within the confines of her dark little home. The only difference between Relm's actual memories of the piano lessons and the dream version of events was that the woman now sported a dog's head, and whenever Relm missed a note she would howl as if red-hot pokers were being shoved up her rear end. It wasn't too far from how she had usually behaved, actually.

Usually the lessons had ended with the old woman falling asleep at her post while Relm snuck out to practise magic or painting in the woods around Thamasa. The dream merely dissolved and morphed, as dreams have a habit of doing, bleeding into another impossibly strange situation involving men with cameras for heads following her as she looked for Shadow around the house. Eventually Relm found him lazing in the broom cupboard and made a snatch for the ninja's hood, but just as she pulled it away the camera-men set off their flashbulbs and she was temporarily blinded by the intermittent dark-to-light glare. She couldn't see his face, and that _really_ pissed her off.  
_  
_Coming out of a dream was like being pushed up through deep waters. Relm could fight it and on occasion _did_ fight it with all her subconscious heart, but eventually she'd have to hit the surface for air, like it or not. Usually the last vestiges of the dreams burned away quickly, but today they seemed to be hanging on for much longer than usual; Relm could actually still hear the _click-clack_ and see the light of the flashbulbs going off through her closed eyelids. Wait, when the heck had she fallen asleep?

She opened her eyes. There was hay everywhere, including her hair. For a moment Relm wondered if she had fallen asleep cleaning out Bill's stall, but then the previous two months came rushing back, much as they had on awakening in Sally's bed, and she scrambled to her feet. The rocking and swaying very quickly sent her back to a sitting position with a thump.

Oh _shit_.

The flashbulbs had actually been the early morning sun strobing through the slats of the boxcar. The _click-clack_ noise that had haunted her dreams the entire night was, quite obviously now, the sound of the train clattering along its track just underneath her ear. She had fallen asleep, and the train had taken off with her in tow – without Interceptor.

Trying desperately not to panic, Relm staggered back to her feet – carefully this time – and stumbled to the sliding door. With an effort she rolled it away, flooding the musty interior of the car with sunshine and an impossibly hot, dry wind. Relm blinked several times, trying to adjust her eyes to the sudden brightness.

When her eyes finally got used to the light and she could see, the swearing that came out of the girl's mouth would have whitened the hair of a Nikean sailor.

They were well into the Figaro Desert, and the land flashing by outside was nothing but sand, hundreds and hundreds of miles of it. A trip that usually took two weeks on foot had been halfway covered in a little less than fifteen hours. Relm had never hated technology so much as she did at that moment, glaring out into the motion-blurred landscape of yellow and gold. She had hoped that maybe the train hadn't made it very far, that perhaps she could jump off and run back to South Figaro before anything happened to Interceptor, but there was no possible way that was happening now. If the fall didn't kill her the desert would; it had killed better travellers and more experienced explorers time and time again before the railroad was built.

She slumped against the thin wall of the box car, utterly defeated. The only chance of finding him again would be if Edgar sent someone back to have a look; otherwise it would be up to her to turn around and return the way she had come until the lost dog was found. And South Figaro was a huge, bustling city - Interceptor could be _anywhere _by now. The urge to put her head in her hands and cry was overwhelming. He was her best friend, her compadre, and she had gone off and fucking _left _him. Stupid stupid STUPID.

Nothing more could be done until the train finally reached its destination at Figaro Castle, one way or the other. Relm stared out at the dead world as it passed her by and prayed to every long-gone Esper she could remember the name of to protect Interceptor until the two were together again.

---

It was late afternoon before they finally stopped, and Relm had never been so hot and miserable in her life. The train's speed caused a nice little breeze to whip through the boxcar, but it was still overbearingly warm inside and Relm's waterskin was completely empty. By the time the switching yards came into sight her lips were chapped and cracking and she had a headache that felt like a chocobo cob trying to peck its way through her skull. The squealing, crashing noise of the cars coming to a violent halt did _not _help things, as relieving as it was that the journey was over.

Relm waited a few minutes until her legs were a lot less like jelly and her head wasn't whirling quite so fiercely, then carefully climbed out of the car and strode purposefully towards the nearest Figarian guards she could find. It was easy enough to spot them, because the official uniforms of Figaro, to put it nicely, looked like a festive wreath had had an abortion all over the place. Pestering Edgar to change it never helped; all he said was "I like red and green!" and so red and green it stayed, complete with 'tasteful' gold trim. They were all damned lucky Edgar's favourite colour hadn't been paisley or something.

Swallowing her artistic distaste for their attire, Relm marched right up to the two sentries, who merely eyeballed her with tired curiosity. Sentry duty in Figaro, Relm guessed, was a hot and boring duty you got handed when there weren't enough toilets for you to clean and the royal chocobo stables were already spotless. The pair in front of her looked like they had been thoroughly cooked, so much so that not even a lone girl wandering in from the trainyards piqued their interest.

She thrust both her wrists in their direction and stared expectantly. One of them glanced down, obviously slightly confused as to why she was standing there, but didn't bother wasting precious energy trying to speak when it was so much easier to just ignore her. A loud cough merely got her an even more baffled look, this time from both the guards. Relm sighed. Fine, she'd spell it out for them if they were THAT fried. In a monotone voice she addressed the twosome.

"I was a stowaway on the Figaro Freightline. I'm here to turn myself in. Please take me to your leader."

Again Relm thrust her fists towards the sentries. Again they merely looked at her, this time with a little more concern. The taller of the two leaned down and studied her face, his eyes filled with worry.

"… Um, are you alright, kid? You get lost from a tour of the castle or something?"

All he got for his trouble was a fit of eye-rolling and another exasperated sigh. "No. I stowed away. I should be punished to the fullest extent of the law." She paused, then continued, with all the emphasis she could muster. "_Please take me before the King, I wish to speak with him. _Urgently."

The first sentry glanced at his companion nervously, who looked right back at his partner with the most bewildered expression Relm had ever seen grace a human visage. They stared at one another with that same dumbstruck look for a full minute before the first shrugged helplessly and turned back to Relm, obviously bested.

"Erm … Come with us then, please."

Relm allowed herself a smirk as the two escorted her towards the castle. _Finally_. How dense _were _the guys Edgar was hiring? Sheesh.


	12. XII

_XII_

Edgar Roni Figaro loved women.

Yes indeed. He loved the way they looked, loved the way they smelled, loved the way they giggled demurely when he said something witty. From Jidoor debutantes to lusty Nikean barmaids to the flighty southern belles of Albrook, Edgar adored them all, each and every precious mother's daughter. If they were single and legal – and sometimes even if they weren't – King Edgar would be there, with a winning smirk and an extended hand. He was fair of face and cultured from years of training and, more importantly to some, very, very rich. What lady could possibly resist such a combination?

At the moment he was playing 'Woo the Lass' with a pretty little dark-haired thing from the town of Tzen. She couldn't have been much older than seventeen and behaved more than a little naively; Edgar had thought that particular trait all but wiped out of the population after the grim happenings of four years previous, but this poor girl seemed completely baffled by the world outside her hometown. How she had survived long enough to make it to his castle and how she had been hired on as a maid Edgar would never know, but that was neither here nor there. The important thing was that she was here _now, _and more importantly that she was comely. As soon as the king laid eyes on her the hunt began with a vengeance.

From his seat at the dinner table Edgar waved her over, flashing twin rows of immaculately straight teeth that put every other set of pearly whites in the kingdom to shame. There were many benefits to being a regent, free dental care one of the best. Edgar had even invented several devices for straightening crooked teeth, but the dentists of the land seemed strangely loathe to test them out on the populace, lest an uprising occur.

"Catherine, could you get me another glass of wine, please?" he purred, carefully handing the timid girl a fluted crystal cup. "I'd be … most appreciative if you would do so." Another flash of the white smile.

The maid's hand was shaking slightly as she took the glass from between Edgar's slender fingers. The pads of his fingertips brushed against her skin, so slightly that with anyone else the caress might've been considered an accident, and at the touch the young woman very nearly lost her composure and dropped the stemmed cup to the floor. She managed to fumble a save as it tumbled towards the carpet and with much blushing and apologizing rushed out of the room to fetch more wine. Edgar resisted the urge to laugh at his handiwork and went back to studying a stack of blueprints scattered over the tabletop, plans for an automatic crop-watering system some of his more agriculturally-minded subjects had requested not long ago. It wasn't the most interesting invention in the world, and Edgar would've been much happier working on the dimensions for the flying machine he and Setzer were collaborating to build, but a king had duties. The people needed crops for their redoubling numbers, and the only way to make bountiful crops grow in the dusty kingdom of Figaro was through judicious irrigation.

Catherine came back several moments later with his glass, filled almost to overflowing. Edgar took it from her with a smile of thanks, sipping casually at the rich red wine before setting it down on the table. He motioned for the maid to have a seat and watched with obvious amusement as she pulled up a chair and sat down.

"You know, I was looking at this wine – a _fine_ vintage, the Maranda vineyard it comes from is under the ocean now – and I couldn't help but notice how the colour matches your lips almost exactly. Isn't that strange?" He tipped back in his chair, picking up the glass once again to better study its contents. "In a way you and this fine wine are much the same. Both … intoxicating, both beautiful to look at, and both created in another world, which makes you far more precious than rubies or diamonds. Now, as for the _taste …_"

Edgar had her in the palm of his hand. Flattery worked wonders on the ditzy ones; she was blushing and giggling between her fingers at him shyly, obviously entranced that the king thought so highly of her. No dove charmed by the serpent ever went so willingly. He was _just_ leaning across the table to take her hand when the door flew open and a dirty, smelly, dishwater-blonde cannonball launched itself at his waist, followed by two scandalized guards. The chair Edgar had been leaning back in so precariously finally tipped over, spilling the king, his tackler, and the glass of red wine all onto the floor. Catherine leapt out of her chair and shrieked, adding her shrill voice to the cacophony of breaking glass and shouting. It took a few moments for Edgar to figure out what the hell had just happened, but when he did …

"What the—_Relm! _What in Starlet's name are you doing here!" he yelped, scrambling to his feet among the wreckage while furiously trying to shake the clinging girl off as best he could. Despite his best efforts to break free she stuck tight; there was a wickedly mischievous glint in her eyes that Edgar didn't like one damned bit.

She looked up, wrapped her arms tighter around his waist, and cried out, "DADDY!"

The soldiers skidded to a halt. Catherine's jaw dropped. Where there had been an absolute din five seconds earlier, one could've heard a pin drop. Edgar looked up helplessly at the serving maid, then back at Relm, then back at the wench.

"I … she's not mine! It's all a practical joke or something! Relm, sweetie ..." – _don't sound murderous, don't sound murderous – _"Stop joking around and tell them who you really are. G'wan."

Relm just hugged him harder, her face inscrutable. "Daddy, why did you leave me and Mummy? Was it something she did? I've been looking for you all these fourteen years and now I've finally found you! Oh, we can be a _family _again!"

Catherine, not much older than his supposed daughter, turned beet-red and very quickly excused herself from the room with a swish of fabric.

Edgar turned red too, but for entirely different reasons.

---

"You know, I could have you clapped in irons for pulling stunts like that," Edgar muttered glumly, staring into another glass of wine with his chin in his hands. Matron had fetched it for him along with a paper of headache powders; he had a feeling Catherine wouldn't be serving him anything but a disgusted look from across the hallway for quite a long time. He could try to explain, but what was the use? The inconsolable monarch shot another bleak glance at his dinner companion, busy wolfing down his finest filet mignon and mutton stew like she hadn't eaten in weeks. From the garbled report Edgar had managed to extract before Relm set upon his dinner like a starving wolf, that was probably true, but he still wasn't feeling particularly charitable towards the girl.

"There's a word for what you did to me, Relm, but it's not polite to say it in present company. I hope you're happy."

"Yeah, it's called saving you from sexual harassment charges. Can I have a bit more to drink, please?"

Edgar deftly slid a bottle of white grape juice in front of her hand as she reached for the cider. Relm stuck a bright pink tongue out at him but he was still deeply involved in delving the depths of his Chateau Maranda and didn't really care _what_ looks or gestures she shot him. He didn't want Strago haunting him for getting his underage granddaughter intoxicated, thank you very much, and the idea of a drunken Relm quite honestly scared Edgar beyond comprehension anyway.

"Couldn't you just have, I dunno, come in the _normal_ way instead of lying to my guards and scaring away my maids with your false claims of paternity? What in Shiva's name possessed you to make such a scene?" He knew the answer very well – it was Relm and she enjoyed making a scene – but figured it wouldn't hurt to ask, just in case any light could be shed on that murky subconscious of hers. The only reply he got was a broad, gravy-rimmed grin from over the piles of dirty plates and cutlery she was busy making. Was that her _sixth _course? Edgar had lost count. Bloody wine. Bloody girl.

She slid the dirtied bowl away and reached for a silver platter sporting about fourteen different kinds of cheesecake, all imported and by association heart-rendingly expensive. In between cramming forkfuls of cake into her mouth, she asked, "meryrryonnaendsomeonefternntereptor?"

Edgar blinked. "Run that by me again, madam?"

Relm managed to swallow a mouthful of pastry that Edgar was quite sure shouldn't have fitted down her throat, then spoke again. "…I said, 'So are you really going to send someone back for Interceptor?' Because, I mean … that's really nice of you."

"Yes, I know," Edgar replied dryly, reaching over to grab a bite-sized slice of the cheesecake himself. Sabin gave him merry hell for his sweet tooth and was overly fond of telling his brother how quickly the ladies would abandon him when he became a 700-pound lard-arse, but Edgar didn't care. Sometimes you had to indulge yourself, be it with women or food. "The way you've acted I shouldn't give you any help at all, first running off and scaring us all half to death and now this afternoon's charades. Do you know how worried you've had Terra? You can't just disappear for eight months without telling anyone, it's disrespectful and thoughtless and more than a little selfish."

"Sabin did it once."

"Yes dear, but Little Brother's head is made of twenty percent meat and eighty percent bone and we can't judge him for his mental failings. You've got plenty of brains in that moppet-skull, _try_ to use them sometime." He sighed and tossed the entire slice of cake into his mouth carelessly. "But it's not the dog's fault his mistress is crazy, so yes, I will send someone back to look for him and put up a reward to boot. You still haven't told me why exactly you took off after the funeral like that, though. I'd appreciate at _least_ that much of an explanation before expending manpower and gil on finding Little Fenrir Lost, if you'll extend me that courtesy."

There was a long pause. Relm fumbled halfheartedly with her fork and then muttered something Edgar had to strain his ears to hear.

"Heard you guys in the hall. You and Terra."

A light went on in Edgar's brain. "Oh."

"Yeah." Relm scowled at him, her face a thundercloud. "It would've been nice if you two had discussed your plans to ship me off to Terra's little halfway house, y'know, _with _me? I can take care of myself. Wasn't I fine when we all got split up after the … airship crashed?"

"I've never debated your ability to take care of yourself, milady, and I'm quite sure Terra wouldn't do such a thing either. _However_, there's a big difference between being on your own for a year because no-one can help it and spending the rest of your adolescence holed up in Thamasa with nothing but a dog for company. You need to learn to live with _people, _Relm. I'm sure Interceptor is a fine companion, but there's only so much a friend with a sixteen-year lifespan can do for you."

"… Well, that's not the only reason I left Thamasa."

Ah-_ha_. Here it came. "Do tell?"

Edgar didn't think he had ever seen Relm's face so serious before, and considering they had battled a psychotic super-god-clown with world-destroying capabilities together, that was saying something. "… I want to find Shadow. He's … Edgar, he's my _dad_."

… Okay, he hadn't seen _that _one coming. "What."

"He's my dad. Strago left me a letter. Shadow's real name is Clyde Arrowny, and he's the same one that robbed the Doma Line almost fifteen years ago. He got wounded and ended up in Thamasa and apparently met my mother." Relm shrugged. "One thing led to another and … here I am. But I want to know why he left me, and I want to know what my mom was like, and … I've just _gotta_ find him, Edgar. Please help me."

The pleading, desperate tone of her voice was something altogether new, and Edgar didn't think he liked it at all. He was used to the strong, wickedly mischievous Relm who played pranks and acted far too old for her age; this slight, big-eyed creature begging him for information was an entirely different person. A child, a confused little girl.

He stood abruptly from his seat and walked to the window, staring out at the desert evening. There were a few stars splashed across the heavens, and the dunes had already gone a deep, royal purple. Occasionally a soldier or two would stroll across his field of vision on their way to the mess hall, but otherwise everything was quiet and peaceful. Edgar stood there for some time with his hands folded behind his back, trying very hard to think of a solution to these vexing problems she had presented him with.

"… I know where Shadow is."

Relm came out of her seat. Edgar waved for silence before she could say a word.

"He's in Kohlingen, living under the name Clyde Sparrow. Last time I was there for business I saw him; he's the city's monster-killer. He didn't tell me who he was, but I could tell. No-one moves like Shadow, you know?" He turned to face Relm again, his own face a mask of concern. "But Relm, he's … The man's got a new life. I'm … not sure what you hope to find there, but personally I would say end this quest now. He's not Shadow any more, and I can't say if he's Clyde because I never _knew _Clyde, but from what I've seen I would guess he's probably not. What exactly do you hope to gain by confronting him?"

Her voice was whisper-quiet. "I want to know why he left me. He just … disappeared after the Kefka thing, and he didn't even leave me his name before going again. Just Interceptor."

"Relm, to be honest, I think he put more value on the dog than his name. You should be flattered."

She shook her head, stubborn as always. "I have to find him."

Well, no-one could say he hadn't tried to deter her, if it came to tears. The king dragged himself back to his chair and slumped into it as if the weight of the world was riding on his shoulders. Sure as heck _felt _like it was sometimes, that was for sure. "Fine. Just remember, if things don't work out up there, you have friends down here. There's no need to wander around the world like a guttersnipe, my dear, even if playing the martyr _is _in fashion."

Relm snorted. He was glad to hear her making her old derisive noises again, the little wretch. "Don't worry, I'll remember. I'll come back to eat more of your food as soon as I can." She plopped back into her chair as well, moving with the same careless grace Edgar had seen in Shadow so many times before. Why hadn't he ever noticed how similarly they moved? Now that he knew about the blood link it was so obvious it might as well have been printed on her forehead in letters three feet high. "I guess Gau was right, you _do _know everything about everyone. I owe him one for that."

Edgar's eyebrow shot nearly to his hairline. "You've seen Gau? Now _there's_ a tasty tidbit of information Cyan would be interested in hearing. Where is our other little escapee, anyway?"

"Veldt. Goddesses Edgar, where _else _do you think he'd go, North Jidoor? C'mon. He's fine, I stayed with him for a night." Noting Edgar's mock-scandalized expression she hastened to add, "In his _cabin_, you pervert. Ew. Don't be sick." The sudden reddish tone of her cheeks was nearly enough to egg him on into several more dirty jokes, but somehow he managed to refrain, casually taking a coin out of his pocket and tossing it into the air.

"He's in love with you, you know. You should give the poor boy a chance, you're like two peas in a pod. And don't make those gagging sounds, it's not polite."

"Whatever." Was there a hint of uncertainty in her voice? How intriguing. "He's gonna get pushed off the Veldt soon anyway, there are people everywhere. Did we _really _kill Kefka so bankers and merchants and farmers could run the world? With all the magic gone it seems so … dull."

"No, sweetie, we killed Kefka so he wouldn't murder us all as we slept. _Speaking_ of which, if you're sympathizing with Kefka I think it's time for you to go to bed. You can stay here for a few days, and then off you go to Kohlingen to make Shadow very uncomfortable indeed." Edgar rose from his seat, stretching like a velvet-clothed tiger. "You know where the guest bedrooms are, I believe?"

"You mean the ones that don't contain courtesans from Tzen?"

"Good-_night_ Relm."

---

Edgar Figaro had a litany of vices. He was something of a mad inventor, occasionally he took his kingly duties less than seriously, and, of course, there was always that overpowering love of the ladies. However, there was one thing you couldn't accuse him of, and that was dishonesty. The word _nobleman_ had been specially invented to describe Edgar; he might woo a scullery maid out of her master's kitchen and build whirring mechanical contraptions that worked once and then exploded into deadly shrapnel, but never once during these escapades would he lie or try to deceive those around him unless they richly deserved it. His word was his bond. _Sure_ he might exaggerate a tad to a pretty girl now and again, but who didn't?

When he said he wouldn't stop Relm and would even aid her on the final leg of her journey, he meant it. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a bad idea, conceived in rashness and executed in emotional instability, but after that night at the dinner table he never spoke another word against it. Experience was the best teacher, and Edgar suspected Relm was going to get a hell of a dose once she made it up to Kohlingen.

Four days of harried packing passed – Edgar wouldn't let her leave without plenty of provisions and Relm didn't seem too inclined to refuse them – and soon enough the girl was prepared to continue onwards. She was restless the entire night before; Edgar, up late scribbling away at his blueprint plans, saw her several times that evening haunting the hallways and passages of the castle like a red-booted ghost. He had a faint hope that maybe she would change her mind and go back home, but when dawn broke there was a faint knock on his door. Relm stood in the hallway with her pack, bleary-eyed but ready to go.

They walked together to an area just outside the fortress gates, where a groom stood at attention holding Relm's chocobo mount. Several times during her stay she had mentioned how prohibitively expensive it was to rent stable chocobos, so as a goodwill gesture and an act of friendship Edgar had made her a present of one, a pretty yellow pen with plenty of speed and stamina, bred in his own royal stables. Relm would make much better time on a chocobo, and he figured the faster she got to her destination the better.

He gave her a leg up into the saddle. There was an awkward silence as the two friends tried to think of things to say, for neither of them was particularly good at goodbyes and Edgar was more than a little sulky that Relm was being so stubborn about the entire affair. Then the chocobo tried to buck her rider off in a fit of early-morning restiveness and the resulting fracas seemed to shatter the ice a little, since keeping a straight face while Relm was hanging halfway off her chocobo was a nearly impossible task.

"No wonder you gave me this bird, she's freakin' _nuts. _Thanks a ton, Edgar," Relm muttered, desperately clinging to the chocobo's feathery neck as it plunged and reared and very nearly trampled to death the stableboy holding the reins. Edgar was too busy laughing to give an immediate response. "Is there anything else you would like to tell me about Warkzilla right now or are you, like, going to wait and let me find out when I'm crossing Figaro Channel and she decides to come back home instead?"

"Oh, I think half the joy will be letting you find out on your own, madam," he replied archly, making a sweeping bow to both rider and mount. Relm snatched the reins away from the groom and hauled back on them so hard the chocobo's neck nearly bent over backwards; after that she had no more trouble with her new ride. Edgar patted Relm's leg affectionately, still chuckling to himself. "Don't worry though, she's a fine beast and won't play _too _many nasty tricks on you if you watch her well. I'm sorry we couldn't take you closer to Kohlingen ourselves, but they're still doing maintenance on the tunnel and I don't want to risk getting the castle stuck underground like last time. Chocobos are good swimmers, just be careful of the current and let her have her head when you cross, alright?"

Relm nodded, gazing off into the morning fog in the direction of the channel and Kohlingen. It was dark and overcast and the cloud bank was so thick you could barely see half a mile in any direction, but a little fog wasn't going to slow Relm down, not when her father was somewhere out there. "Thanks for … well, everything, Edgar. And you'll make sure someone looks out for Interceptor?"

"I give you my word as a gentleman and a citizen of Figaro it will be done, my dear. I'll even have sentries go out and look for him around the castle every morning in case he somehow followed you, although I seriously doubt _that_." He seriously doubted the dog could survive if it tried to cross the desert but didn't voice this opinion; best not to worry Relm, lest she become distracted and make even more stupid mistakes than she usually did. "And what will you have us do if we find him, stick the unlucky fellow in a crate and ship him to you in Kohlingen?"

"Just … keep him for me until I come back. It was a mistake to let him come along; I should've locked him up better before I left. Do you know he went through a _window _to follow me? Crazy dog."

"I am aware. We found the shattered panes after you had both gone."

There was another pause, but the silence this time seemed far less frigid and much more amiable. "Well … I guess I'll be off then. Sorry I couldn't wait for Cyan to get back, but … you know." Relm kicked her chocobo into a fast trot and began to disappear into the fog, golden spurts of desert sand shooting from underneath the bird's heavy claws with each step it took. "Take care of yourself, Edgar! Don't forget to use protection, those brothels can be _killer_ without a raincoat!"

"Madam, I cordially invite you to get stuffed," was the cheerfully shouted reply. "Come back soon, you nasty little imp. Be careful out there, or Terra will have my hide."

Her faint retort came from somewhere distant and out of sight.

"_Don't make me picture your hide_!"


	13. XIII

_

XIII

  
_  
Relm never seemed to mind the stares she and her shaggy escort got whenever they entered a village or city. She was a brash, outspoken girl who did unusual things all the time; surprised expressions were nothing new to her at all. Some thought she even _liked _the attention, and this was not entirely untrue. It was nowhere near untrue, in fact.

_Interceptor_, on the other hand, noticed and resented every human eye that set its gaze upon him. A stare was a hostile thing to a creature of the wild, a challenge and a threat, and he met every look with fluttering lip and baleful glare – most of the time this was more than enough to make even the most curious passers-by switch their interest to other, less perilous sights. Some instinctively feared him and shrank away when they saw the big black half-breed following his owner down the sidewalk, while others wanted to reach out and pat his head or fondle his ears. A quick word from the girl was usually enough to warn these latter types off, but if they persisted in bothering him the ever-useful snarl usually did the trick. Otherwise the rest of humanity did not exist to Interceptor; he ignored them as readily as he worshipped the girl. Men he would not hesitate to attack. Women he might lift his lips at, but reprisal was generally less forthcoming. _Children_ were a baffling mystery to the dog. They were weak, and young, and so he regarded them much as he would have an annoying puppy, with stoic (and slightly exasperated) patience. The girl had been different of course - he had sensed _her _in the child's blood and spirit and this had been quite enough to make Interceptor a willing slave, going so far as to leave the man in black on several occasions just to stay at her side. He loved the man with all of his great heart, but the memory of the woman owned his soul.

As for the rest of the human litters, Interceptor paid them no mind. There seemed to be hundreds of them in every city, running through the streets in loose, giggling packs. They were as ubiquitous as leafers on the plains, and far less interesting because he couldn't give chase. Therefore he ignored them, even when they brushed past the girl in their unthinking, clumsy way.

… At least, he had until this day, anyway. On _this_ day he had changed his habits, and all at once the world had gone out from under him like rotten river ice breaking beneath a heavy weight.

They had been in yet another city, one of the biggest the girl had yet led him into. Interceptor had stayed close at her side as he always did, nervous and fearful of the sights and smells threatening to overwhelm his finely-tuned senses. The sounds of men and women chattering and laughing and shouting in every octave filled his eardrums; once a carriage rumbled by almost on top of the two, and the harsh cracking of the whip and yells of the driver very nearly sent Interceptor out of his wits with fear. Only the girl's soothing hand on his head kept him from bolting away through the crowd in terror.

Eventually they had made it out of the worst of the congestion, emerging near a double-set of shining tracks that reminded Interceptor disconcertingly of the Bad Places. They had smelled of the ruined castle and the bad forest, but it was a faint aroma, so faint he had merely raised his hackles and followed the girl onwards without even a whimper of fear. After the events in the castle there was not much Interceptor would balk at, and he didn't even blink an eyelash at the train-cars, despite bad experiences with their type in the past. He had been in the act of cocking his leg on the tracks – just to show what he thought of them, of course – when the lurking boy caught his watchful eye.

It was a scruffy one, very thin and very young, and ordinarily Interceptor wouldn't have given it a second glance. The thing that had given the wolf-dog pause was just what the child had been up to. It had quite boldly reached into the girl's pack and stolen an item she seemed to love dearly, an item that had once been the woman's. Then without another look around it had fled back into the crowd, before Interceptor could even think to act or spring.

If the child had been a grown man Interceptor's teeth would have been buried in the flesh of its neck before it took two steps away from the scene of the crime. However, its youth made Interceptor pause for just a bit longer than normal, and in those few moments of hesitation it had gotten away, slipping off as easily as a fox after a henhouse raid. Its scent-trail had still been fresh on the ground, but it wouldn't have stayed that way for long with all the human activity in the area. Interceptor had been faced with a grave decision – follow the thief and retrieve his mistress's belonging or stay at her side as he had always done, sure in the knowledge that she was safe and he was there to protect her and keep her that way.

The choice had only taken a few moments, but to the dog it had seemed like ages. He had stood watching the girl's face for some time before leaping away into the throng, and every instinct in his body had told him to stop when she yelled out his name and gave chase. For three years he had been her constant companion, sleeping at the foot of her bed, dogging her footsteps wherever she travelled, and lying patiently in wait when she went places he could not follow. Leaving the girl's side – especially when she was giving him conflicting orders – was a sundering of his very nature, but something told him it had to be done, and so he did.

(However, this _was_ the second time in six months Interceptor had disobeyed a command, and the fact wounded him grievously. He was officially a Bad Dog, but perhaps she would forgive him when he came back with the lost item. _Then _he would be a Good Dog again.)

Interceptor's sense of smell, like that of all canines, was superlative. He had no trouble at all following the child's zig-zagging path, fresh as it was, and when the culprit was finally cornered it had returned the stolen thing without any further fight or hassle. The problem came when Interceptor returned to the spot where he had left the girl.

She was not there. She was not _anywhere_. The boxcars were gone, and so was she. With growing franticness the wolf-dog quested through the crowds searching for a trail, but the smell of her was old and overlaid with the footsteps of ten thousand others. The girl's scent-path ended at the train-tracks, disappearing into thin air. It was as if a monster had swooped down from the heavens and carried her away. Once he thought he saw her struggling through the mass of people, but when he ran to greet her with a joyous _whuf_ it turned out to be a stranger, a mere child who shied away and screamed when she saw the great black shape bounding towards her. Interceptor turned away with lowered head and drooping tail, the very picture of dejected confusion.

Nothing made sense. He had only left her for what seemed like a few moments, but in those moments his very world had been turned upside down. Interceptor's entire lot in life was to serve and protect the girl, but now the girl was gone. Night was falling and he was alone, frightened and bewildered in a habitat as alien to him as the Veldt would have been to many a city-dweller. The gas lights blinded his eyes and the smells of soot and chocobo dung and dust confused his nose.

He made short, halting dashes through the forest of legs, first in one direction, then the other. They were hesitant steps, and if anyone had taken the time to look downwards and seen the dog's upturned eyes desperately scouring the sea of faces, they would have immediately known he was lost. No-one did; they were too busy with their own lives and affairs, and stray dogs were no uncommon thing in the cities. Once a boy-child did take a lively interest in him, but the interest mainly involved idly throwing sharp stones at his legs, and the fact that it was young was the only thing that stopped Interceptor from taking all his fear and frustration out on the feckless creature's hide. He fled to the outermost reaches of the train-yard, where people were not so thick and the air clearer.

Evening had begun to dip into purple twilight. A dusk wind kicked up, swift and refreshingly cool after the stifling airlessness of the crowds. Interceptor lifted his head and sniffed deeply of the breeze as it ruffled his coat – it was blowing to the west. _The west …  
_  
Some instinct urged Interceptor to follow the wind, to run as fast as he could towards the sunset. The desire was almost overpowering in its call; if he went west, he would find the girl. No other direction _felt _right, and the canine had nothing to go on but his feelings. He did not doubt them, like a human would have, but trusted in the instincts nature had given him. She was waiting for him, somewhere out there in the darkness.

He threw back his head and let out a long, lonesome howl that chilled the marrow of every late-travelling commuter and vagrant within a five-mile radius. Then without another sound he disappeared into the night, already falling into the slow, steady wolf-trot that eats up the miles and runs the rhinox to ground.

---

Figaro Desert did not begin abruptly. It crept up on travellers stealthily, the only sign that it was coming a slow disappearance of green vegetation the farther northwest one journeyed from the city of South Figaro. Long stretches of parched earth spread their tentacles outward inch by dry inch, until the ground was entirely grassless and there was nothing but sand and rocky wasteland as far as the eye could see. Eventually even the rocks and packed dirt vanished, leaving one adrift in a sea of dunes that moved with the slow, stately rhythm of ocean waves. Tracks vanished in the blink of an eye and sight was dazzled by the glittering crests; unless the desert wanderer was well-provisioned and extremely adept at finding his or her way, disorientation usually set in, as good as a death curse in this place where every second counted and the temperature soared well beyond the body's meagre limits.

When they came over that last hill between where the packed earth stopped and the dunes began, many men quailed with fear. The sight of the changeless expanses sweeping before them put a mighty terror into even the staunchest heart, and some went mad, or took the long way around rather than step into a wilderness of sand they might very well never come out of.

Interceptor did none of those things. He was, after all, merely an animal, and no-one had ever told him that Figaro Desert was a deathtrap, or warned him against crossing it. Instinctively he recognized that it was a harsh place, but he did not cower and think about the many ways he might die out there underneath the baking sun. That is not the way of beasts. All he knew was that his girl was waiting somewhere on the other side of the sands, and that cross it he must. There were no ifs, ands, buts, or maybes in Interceptor's black-and-white world.

He sat looking down at the empty quarter, watching the heat distortions ripple along the horizon in curiosity. Then he arose and without ceremony or prelude trotted down onto the dunes. The race was on; the clock was ticking away.

The first two days were the easiest. Interceptor still had plenty of water left in his system, and during the hottest part of the day he took refuge in the overhanging root systems of stunted trees, the dead remnants of a lusher time in this barren place. The sands had blown away from their bases, leaving shadowy hollows between the dried-up tendrils once used for pulling up moisture from the ground. When the sun was at its zenith and no life stirred Interceptor slept underneath these, scratching deep nests into the ground until the cool of the evening came and made crossing easier. Night was his preferred time to travel, but the nagging urge to keep moving sometimes grew too strong to ignore, and he started out while the heat of the day was in full force. It cost him dearly in body moisture and sweat dripped off his panting tongue in droplets, but he made better time.

By the third day his steps were lagging, and there were no tree-roots to hide under when noon rolled around and the sand grew so hot it burned his paws. Interceptor's heavy black coat actually insulated him against the worst of the heat, but any benefit was quickly made null by the way it soaked up the sun's rays. There was no water or moisture to lap at anywhere; his tongue had actually begun to crack and dry up, all the fluids in the dog's body – including saliva - needed to help propel him forward just a little further.

A strange visitor came to the weary traveller that day as well, a tiny fennec fox with ears three times the size of its head. With mild curiosity (and from a safe distance) it watched its big cousin plod onwards before trotting off, and Interceptor paid it no mind. The young fox trailed him for the next two days, perhaps hoping for a kill it could scavenge or maybe even a playmate. Interceptor satisfied neither of these cravings in his companion, for there was nothing to kill and no time or energy with which to frolic even if he _had_ been in the habit of tolerating foxes. It did have one useful habit, though: the little creature was an expert digger and had a nose for finding water seeps buried underneath the sand, as scattered and incredibly rare as they were in this heat-blasted place. The only reason Interceptor was able to keep going was because he chased the poor beast away when it scraped wells for itself, then lapped greedily at the muddy moisture with his grossly swollen tongue.

Eventually even the fennec fell behind, and on the fifth day Interceptor's mind began to go. He saw things that scent and hearing told him were not there, images that wavered and disappeared in his poor field of vision from moment to moment. People and packmates long-dead walked beside him underneath the scorching sun, sometimes beckoning him onwards when all the exhausted wolf-dog wanted to do was lie down and rest. Once it was the girl. Another time it was the man in black, walking placidly a few feet ahead. At still other moments it was his big grey mother, who had died in a snare-trap just outside Narshe years and years before.

Sometimes it was the woman, and when _she _appeared Interceptor called upon all the strength left in his failing body and tried madly to catch up, black and swollen tongue roiling from his mouth, eyes wild with desperation. She was always just out of reach though, and no amount of running could ever bring him to her side. Still, he tried. He could do no less than try when she was so tantalizingly close, smiling and waving for him to _come on, boy!_ in pantomime as she had done so many times in life.

The woman's apparition was the last to appear, and she stayed with him through the heat of the day and far into the night. When he finally collapsed on the cracked earth, leg muscles feebly twitching with the instinctive drive to move forward, it seemed almost as if he could feel her cool hand on his head, scratching him between the ears in benediction.

His tail thumped weakly, just once, and then the dog was still.

---

When the mounted soldiers sent out on patrol came across the unconscious wolf-dog's body in a wash several miles east of Figaro Castle, they thought at first that it was dead. Then one of them saw its side lift, ever so slightly, and that was all the sign they needed. Within moments the beast had been hefted onto one of the rider's laps and was lolling across the saddle-pommel as they galloped away to the west, unheeding but alive.


	14. XIV

_

XIV

_

It was truly amazing that a land so bleak and sun-beaten as Figaro thrived so unerringly well, the most bustling and well-to-do kingdom left in all the world. Sometimes Cyan thought it a cruel joke from the gods that his home, so full of lush greenery and life, had been abandoned and wiped out while this desert nation prospered beyond all measure. He did not resent it, nor would he ever let himself do so – Edgar and Sabin were some of his best friends and had been kind in letting him stay on - but looking out over the sand dunes, he couldn't help but wonder _why_.

He was standing, as he did every morning, on the topmost parapet of the castle, watching as the great red disc of the sun turned the eastern horizon from black to crimson-streaked navy. In two hours time it would be too hot to safely stay in this unshaded aerie, but for now the cool of the night hung on, steadfastly refusing to break before the first light of dawn. Cyan felt more at ease during this time of day than at any other; the beauty of the morning helped him forget old wounds, and the solitude of his lofty perch calmed and prepared him for the long, hot hours ahead. There had been a high place like this in Doma as well, and sometimes he could close his eyes and forget that the past four years had ever happened, pretending that the noises of soldiers and knights clattering to their duties far below came from brave Doman samurai and not Figarians. But eventually the old knight would have to open his eyes, and there was always a lancing stab of pain in his heart when he saw sand dunes instead of rolling green hills and misty mountains. The heartache had lessened with time, but it would never completely fade.

There was a stir of commotion just inside the castle gates, and Cyan strained his eyes to see what the cause was. Edgar had invented a most strange device to combat failing eyesight, two little pieces of glass hinged together with a twist of metal wiring, but it looked terribly undignified and his dignity was one of the few things Cyan had left. They would have been useful now, though … Was that a dead _dog_ the troops were carrying?

With one last glance at the rising sun, he opened the hatch and slipped downstairs to sate his stirring curiosity in as a discreet manner as possible. Proud Doman warriors were _never _nosy, and most certainly wouldn't turn out merely to see what the cat had dragged in.

---

"Ho! Why dost thou bring dead curs into the very halls of thy master, knights of Figaro? Have ye forgotten the way to the rubbish tips? And is this not the hour of thy morning patrols?"

The little knot of soldiers barely looked up at Cyan's hearty hail, intent on whatever they had discovered outside the castle. Snatches of whispered conversation floated to him, curious and concerned.

"… Little girl's dog …"

"Edgar said to bring it back …"

"… Probably dead anyway."

Cyan coughed into his fist and one of the sentries finally turned to address the samurai, giving him a halfhearted and slightly distant salute. All the soldiers respected Cyan – they called him 'Sir Garamonde', an honour usually not extended to their laid-back king – but today they seemed to be unusually distracted. This guard was a baby-faced lad, probably no older than twenty, but there was worry etched over every line of his face.

"Sir Garamonde, we found this dog in a gully not far from the castle borders. King Edgar had told us to be on the lookout for it not two weeks ago, but he demanded it be brought back alive, and … well …" The sentry fidgeted nervously, pulling the army-standard red-and-green cap lower over his eyes. "It's in pretty bad shape, sir. We tried to give it water, but it won't take it. It hasn't even woken up yet."

Why in Alexander's name would Edgar send patrols out looking for a mongrel hound? The boy obviously wasn't lying, that was clear from his eyes, but never the less it was a baffling and quite utterly confusing situation. Cyan pushed his way through the clustered soldiers and finally got a good look at the cause of all the discord, stretched unconscious on the dusty stones of the castle courtyard.

It looked more _wolf_ than dog, at least six feet long from nose to tail-tip, and the width of its paws was as big as a man's outstretched hand. Glazed eyes stared sightlessly from between half-closed lids, blank and unseeing. Underneath the coal-black coat the beast's points showed starkly, each individual rib protruding grotesquely below its covering of drum-taunt skin. Occasionally the side would hitch in a slow, juddering bid for breath, but this was the only way one could tell the creature was alive. To the casual onlooker it appeared to be nothing more than a skeletal corpse, victim of a cruel death underneath the desert sun. If someone didn't act and act fast that was probably how it would end up anyway, despite the good-hearted efforts of the young soldiers.

Cyan did not particularly like dogs. Doman tradition stated that they were unclean animals and thus disallowed them within the sacred confines of the castle; even if this had not been true and Cyan had been fond of pets, he would not have had time to care for one, embroiled as he usually was in the day-to-day rigours of being liege to the King of Doma. Owain had wanted one – he was a quiet, stolid boy and never nagged like some children, though it had been obvious to Cyan – but knowing both the law and his father never asked, burying the desire beneath a layer of stoicism. What a fine warrior he would have made! The old pain rose in Cyan's throat, nearly choking him as he fought to keep his composure in front of the other men.

Owain would have wanted to save this creature. He had been a steadfast child but not a cruel one; one of Cyan's fondest memories was of the boy nursing a sickly falcon chick back to health. The court's falconers had tried to dissuade him, saying it was best to put the weak fledgling out of its misery, but Owain had not listened. The looks on the faces of the aged bird-handlers when he released the raptor three weeks later had made Cyan's moustache twitch in amusement and pride, pleased beyond words that he son would fight for something he believed in against such impossible odds.

What would the boy have thought of his father then, if he could have seen him standing there doing nothing to help this poor beast? Cyan had a soft heart underneath his armour, and the memory of Owain's goodwill towards all creatures, combined with his pity for the animal, overcame the initial distaste bred in him from years of Doman life. He knelt and gingerly felt for a pulse through the thick fur of its ruff. Instead of meeting flesh, however, the old man's fingers found a thin band of metal links, almost hidden from sight underneath the dog's coat. A stray mongrel wearing a necklace? Stranger and stranger still this situation became. Gnarled, horny hands pulled at the chain, finally bringing the silver ring that dangled from it into view. Cyan squinted at the engraved script for but a moment before suddenly turning pale underneath his dark tint. Goddesses above, how had he not _recognized … _

With no further hesitation he picked the wolf-dog up, hoisting it over his shoulders like a fresh-killed deer. It was thin, to be sure, but not light by any means. He spoke over his shoulder to the gathered soldiers, in a sharp tone quite unlike himself.

"Go and fetch Sir Edgar. Send him to my quarters immediately, dost thou understand? Time is of the utmost essence if we hope to save this poor wretch. Go _now_, knaves! Don't stand gawking like moon-addled leafers! Fly!"

Without waiting for a reply Cyan turned and hurried back to his room, the dog still dangling lifelessly from around his neck.

---

"Cyan, I can fix anything mechanical you want, but _that_ is just a little out of my league, I'm afraid."

The old samurai looked up at his friend with sorrowful eyes. Edgar had come running to Cyan's bedchamber as soon as the messenger delivered his news, but the expression on his face when he arrived and saw Interceptor's condition was less than encouraging. The king would have done anything in his power to help a friend – and surely saving the life of her beloved pet would be considered helping Relm, if anything would – but he was also a pragmatist, and Interceptor looked so far past the point of no return there was little chance of bringing him back to life. It was a baffling wonder the dog had managed to cross the desert at all; Edgar found himself awed, as he had been many times before, by the will of instinct.

"If I'd been sure 'twas Relm's beast I would have been thrice as quick about calling for help," Cyan murmured mournfully, lightly stroking the unconscious head with his work-hardened hand. Two hours before he would have recoiled in disgust at the idea of touching a dog, but there was something about this particular animal that stirred tenderness in his heart. "Old age is the thief of memories, and it steals my own more and more as time slips on. Is there not _anything _we can do? Think of the child and her devastation if we should let her bosom chum slip away. I should like to spare her another blow in such a brief stretch, if possible." Again he glanced up at Edgar, who shrugged in response, his own face decidedly grim.

"I don't think there's even any use in trying. I mean, I'd love to bring him back, you _know_ I would, but I've never seen any creature, man or beast, come out of the desert looking like _that _and regain consciousness. Remember the chocobo that broke loose we found out by Stewart's Rock? The sun _cooked _the damned thing; it smelled like a turkey feast for miles around." He sighed and rose to his feet. "That said, I made Relm a promise, and I'll do my best to keep it if I can. Matron should have something for heatstroke, so we'll try that and see what happens, alright?"

"You have a kind heart in thy breast, Sir Edgar, no matter how thou may try to hide it," was the gentle reply. Edgar flashed the Doman a roguish grin.

"Keep it between you and me, old chum. The ladies will walk all over me if they think I've gone soft."

He disappeared out the door, leaving Cyan and Interceptor along together once more. It seemed like a very long time before he returned with a vial in his hand, looking chastised but oddly triumphant.

"This -" and here he held the little glass phial up to the morning sun that streamed through Cyan's window, dappling the room with rainbow prisms of light "- is a very special medicine that Matron only gives to very special cases. You have _no _idea how hard I had to beg for it, but it's done now. I'm going to be scrubbing latrines for the next five years to pay her back, so it _better _work."

Edgar carefully handed the bottle to Cyan, who peered at the thick aquamarine liquid inside in wonder. He would never understand many things about how the world worked, medicines and potions among them, but they fascinated him none the less. Would miracles ever cease? "And if we pour this concoction down yonder hound's throat, he will revive?"

"In a word, yes." Edgar retrieved a leather water-pouch from inside the folds of his coat and tossed it to Cyan as well, a little less careful with this item. "Pour just two drops of the medicine into his water every time you give him a drink. According to Matron, by the third dose he should start to perk up, if he's _going _to perk up."

"And if he does not?"

"Then I'm putting you on grave-digging duty." Edgar gave Cyan another grim half-smile and turned to leave the room again, only to be stopped on the threshold by the knight's slightly confused voice.

"Halt a moment, Sir Edgar. What didst thou mean by 'when _I _give him a drink'?"

Edgar looked over his shoulder with an ingratiating grin. "Why, when you're taking care of him, of course. You seem to like him so much I figured _you'd_ be the one administering the TLC, right?"

"But—Sir Edgar, I must protest, I do not know the least-"

Cyan's spluttering was completely brushed off by Edgar. "Now now, it's really not that difficult at all. Feed him when he's hungry, water him when he's thirsty, and watch out for the teeth if he wakes up in a bad mood. I don't think a dog that weak can do much damage, but better safe than sorry, y'know?"

"Edgar! I-"

The door cut off Cyan's rant in mid-sentence.

---

It was not that Cyan _feared_ the dog. He had slaughtered rival armies with naught but a sword in single-handed combat, slain dragons and demons and spirits of ill omen, and even ridden the train of the dead, once upon a time. The Ashura had tasted the blood of enemies both noble and wicked; if the sickly wolf so much as bared a fang at Cyan he could have its head lopped off in the time it took a gnat to beat its wings. Even if it _had _been a threat he would not have been afraid, for death had lost that fearful edge that kept most mortal men in thrall. He knew who waited at the platform on the other side, and looked forward to his inevitable reunion with much joy.

No, the thing that bothered Sir Cyan Garamonde, retainer to the King of Doma, last of his people, one of the saviours of the world, was the idea of putting his hand in that beast's sputum-encrusted mouth.

It would have sounded strange to anyone but a Doman, but years of training and prejudice against the canine species were woefully hard to break. Cyan pitied the poor creature, but the idea of all that _filth _and all those _germs _and the uncleanliness of it all made him shudder and heave dangerously over the nearest chamberpot (luckily clean). Every story his mother had ever told him to ward the young Cyan away from playing with stray curs outside the city gates came flooding back, and he regarded the unconscious Interceptor's mouth with all the eagerness of a man sent to muck out a dragon's dungheap.

Still, Cyan was a brave fellow, not accustomed to letting himself be dissuaded from any task no matter how difficult or repugnant. He mixed the special medicine as best he could, carefully measuring out the droplets into their leather container, and then with a deep breath and a prayer to Alexander he pried the slender jaws open and poured the mixture down Interceptor's throat, careful to tilt the dog's head back so it didn't choke in its unconscious state. Cyan's moustache twitched disgustedly at the fetid smell – dog breath in his _face_, gods above – but he held both his composure and his charge until the medication was all gone, at which point the latter was dropped like a red-hot poker as Cyan dashed to the porcelain washbasin to scrub his hands raw.

There was no sign of any change in Interceptor's condition throughout most of the morning. Cyan went about his daily activities uninterrupted, practising calligraphy, polishing his weapons collection, and finally going for a walk in the gardens when the cool of late afternoon descended on the castle walls. Edgar, genius inventor that he was, had designed a shaded terrace filled with lush greenery and rare flowers in the centre of his fortress for the edification of all who lived and worked there, a veritable oasis in the very heart of the desert. It was watered by a complicated network of pipes running underneath the castle foundations, but Cyan tried not to think of this aspect too much; it confused his brain and made him feel uneasy. Instead he merely contented himself with the beauty of nature and the wonder of the growing things all around him, stopping occasionally to sniff a budding blossom or touch a tree branch. The tinkling of the fountains and the smell of green grass soothed his frayed nerves and reinvigorated him, which he sorely needed after the stress of medicating Interceptor twice. If there was no improvement upon the third attempt … Well, best not to dwell on such worries in this place of peace. Cyan closed his eyes and absorbed the calm into himself, breathing of it deeply.

He returned to his quarters feeling much lighter and cooler, even smiling politely at a servant or two as he passed them by in the hallway. The smile was still frozen on his lips when he opened the door to his room and found every single item he owned scattered and smashed on the floor and a huge black shape scrabbling feebly at one of the windows.

Vases were crushed. Kimonos were ripped to shreds. The washbasin had been knocked over onto his calligraphy set, soaking parchments, paints, and brushes with dirty water. Feather stuffing from his bed wafted through the air like cherry blossoms. His favourite porcelain statuette of a Doman warrior – a gift from Setzer, bought for an inestimable price at the Jidoor Auction House – was reduced to rubble. Interceptor whirled from his spot at the sill and gave a weak snarl, back legs collapsing underneath his own weight like a broken-down accordion.

Cyan didn't realize what he was doing until he found himself kneeling in the debris next to the dog with a piece of shredded silk in his hands. He deftly avoided the ineffectually snapping jaws and bound them shut with one quick movement, silently thanking Alexander and Odin both that the beast was still weak. Then he looked down into one of Interceptor's panic-glazed eyes and shook his head ruefully.

"Fool," he gently muttered, "wasting all thy energies on fruitless escape. Must thou make a mockery of all my efforts to save thy life?"

Matron's potion _had _worked, that was for certain. One glance at the scattered wreckage of Cyan's room was all it took to confirm _that_. He sighed and, wondering if it was a blessing or a curse, began to clean up the debris around Interceptor, the furry black eye at the centre of the maelstrom. It was little wonder other Domans had thought dogs ill-omened.


	15. XV

_

XV

  
_

The dog glared at the samurai over the dish of raw steak. The samurai, unfazed by the baleful look, stared right back.

"If I unbind thy jaws," he said, very low so any eavesdropping maids in the hallway outside would not hear him talking to a dog, "wilt thou try to make a desecration of my room once more? Or may I trust thee to sup without fuss?"

There was really no telling _what _Interceptor would do once Cyan released his jaws, but the animal couldn't be expected to eat and grow strong without food and drink. He was still so weak it wouldn't be much of a job at all to restrain him if he launched an attack or tried to run amok again. Cyan reached out and, with a quick jerk, removed the binding, ignoring the rumbling growl that began as soon as he stretched out his hand.

For a few moments Interceptor didn't even lift his head off the rug, too tired or too wary to make a sudden move for the meat. Then he raised himself from his prone position and, never taking his eyes off the dark-complexioned man, began to eat from the willowware, growling softly all the while. He did not know this place or how he had arrived there, but he vaguely remembered the man and his funny lip-whiskers. The sad lip-whiskered man had been a friend of the man in black, and this re-assured Interceptor that it was safe to focus his attention on the meat and leave their confrontation at a warning growl for now. It had been so long since Interceptor had eaten a real meal that he almost didn't taste it at first, but then the flavour of blood and rich flesh flooded his mouth and he began to bolt the chunks down. Between plunging his muzzle eyes-deep into the basin of water for drinks and snapping up hunks of steak, he soon forgot completely about the human's quiet presence.

Cyan was more relieved than he would have ever admitted to see the dog taking sustenance on his own. It had been enough of a trial for one day having to clean up the broken shards of many a prized possession from the floor, and while he was glad that his charge's health was improving, a break was extremely welcome. He ate his own dinner of cooked fish and cheese in thoughtful silence, already less squeamish about dining around what he would have earlier considered an unclean beast. He didn't smell much worse than a chocobo, really. At least he didn't have to stick his hand down the blasted thing's mouth again; he had dosed Interceptor's water earlier and made sure of that.

One of the wonderful things about Matron's miraculous medicinal was that, in addition to being a potent restorative, it also had a very powerful tranquilizing effect on whoever partook of it – rest being a curer of all ailments, as every wise old medicine woman knew. Within minutes of finishing off the meat and water Interceptor was making herky-jerky motions with his head as he fought to stay awake, still rumbling softly to himself deep down in his chest. The growl soon turned to a low, untroubled snore.

He was never sure why he did it later on – the creature was unclean and had made a cesspit of his room, no matter who his master was – but watching the ill dog sleep, Cyan felt the same stirring of pity in his heart as before, and reached down to scratch the top of his head.

"Silly beast," he said, more to himself than to Interceptor. "Thou makest foolish, maudlin clowns of us both, blast thy accursed hide."

But he didn't stop petting the dog for a long time.

---

Over the next several days a strange truce began to grow between the two warriors, an uneasy friendship that neither seemed to understand but both grudgingly allowed to continue despite themselves.

Interceptor was slow to accept help at first and growled every time Cyan approached him, wary as always of the hands of man. Men's hands had hurt him gravely in the past, and the only one he had ever really come to trust was the man in black, who was in every way as quiet and vicious as Interceptor himself. Still, his body was very weak, and very wobbly, and so he took the meat and drink the whiskered man proffered with only low growls of warning. The rest of the time he slept on a rug in the corner, gradually regaining back the strength the desert had stolen from him. Some day soon he would set out on the girl's trail once more, but for now nature whispered into his ear that sleep was the quickest way to recovery, and he took the advice and found it good.

Cyan, for his part, was enjoying observing his patient's recovery with more relish than he would have ever admitted to anyone. Interceptor was a dog, a dirty animal if one had ever been put on Alexander's green planet, but he also had so much dignity and bearing it almost hurt Cyan to watch him at times. When he tried to walk and stumbled sprawling on the floor it was almost like seeing an old samurai humiliated, and Cyan often found himself instinctively turning his head away in respect when this happened.

The one thing he never offered was help. Interceptor would have snarled him away if he had tried to give assistance, and it would have been a grave insult to boot. One would have never laid hands on a fellow knight of Doma, and more and more Cyan thought of Interceptor as just that: a noble warrior, a liege of the house of Arrowny. Edgar had (with surprisingly little alcohol to loosen his tongue) finally revealed the truth of Relm's parentage and why she had passed through Figaro earlier; while Cyan was a little bit surprised at the revelation, it made perfect sense once he thought upon it for a spell. The father had given the daughter his knight, of _course. _Cyan had precious little respect for men who left their progeny adrift and fatherless – and even less for ninjas, curse their dishonourable, treacherous hides – but this passing on of the faithful bodyguard to his child made Cyan think twice about what kind of man Clyde Arrowny must be.

And now the liege was separated from his charge - what a mess this entire state of affairs was. Knowing there was nothing else he could do to help, Cyan continued to feed and care for the dog, wondering how exactly they would keep him from his noble mission once his full strength returned.

---

In Interceptor's mind, certain types of people were inexorably linked with certain feelings and emotions. The woman and, by proxy, the girl had brought him happiness and love. The hands of strange men brought hurt and discomfort. Children _other_ than the girl brought sheer unbridled annoyance.

Objects held great meaning as well. Right now, for example, there was a crate in the whiskered man's quarters, and crates meant one thing to Interceptor: treachery. His first master had used a wooden-slatted crate such as this for shipping him to fights outside of  
town, and ever since then Interceptor had growled and bristled at the sight of them. Crates meant nothing but pain. The smell of the pine boards and hay made his lips twist back in an ugly snarl as he circled the crate in bristling suspicion again and again. Some days the dog side of him dominated his moods and actions, but the slinking, crouching walk he used to investigate the box was all wolf.

Cyan watched this display with a mixture of amusement and deep guilt. Edgar had delivered the crate earlier in the afternoon with instructions to get Interceptor secured some time before first light the next morning. The dog's strength had been returning more and more with each day that passed, and before he became completely healthy again Edgar planned on confining him to a spacious pen in the conservatory, lest he go out a window as he had done in Thamasa. Half-dog or no, Interceptor was a dangerous animal without Relm there to control him; the only way to ensure the continued safety of the castle's inhabitants was by containing him until she came back and fetched him, whenever _that _would be. Interceptor would be treated kindly – the cage prepared for him was large, and all of his meals would be fit for royalty – but Cyan had trouble believing the restless creature would allow his liberty to be stolen without a fight.

It didn't seem honest, somehow. Cyan could imagine the scene in his head: Interceptor pacing disconsolately around his cage, like a proud king thrown in a muddy pit, stripped of everything but his pride. The crushing sadness in his eyes, the confusion and frustration … it was as if the thing had already come to pass. And quite to his surprise Cyan found that he did not _want _to see it happen. He had become fond of Interceptor, despite himself; the idea of this strange knight being locked away like some common criminal rankled him deeply.

"This thing is not for us to decide," he muttered to himself, twirling one end of his mustache thoughtfully. Interceptor glanced up at him for a moment, then continued to stalk the crate, stretching himself out almost flat on the floor to touch the slats with the tip of his nose before springing away again. Would they lock the north wind up behind iron bars? Would they strip a samurai of his dignity and honour?

Cyan made a split-second, unwavering decision: not if he could help it.

Before he could change his mind or have a second thought, the Doman had stridden purposefully to the window and flung it wide, letting in a draft of cool air. The dunes outside lay quiet and undisturbed, not a soul abroad to see what he was about to do. Perfect. He carefully stepped away from the threshold and waited.

Interceptor's head had swung up sharply almost as soon as the window was unlatched, sniffing the incoming breeze carefully. He glanced at the man, then at the open window, then back at the man. What kind of trickery was this? In response to the look Cyan merely waved his hand towards the opening again, beckoning the wolf-dog to freedom.

"Go then," he said. "Thy sovereign awaits thee, somewhere on the road."

He may not have understood the words, but the gesture and tone were unmistakable. Interceptor leapt for the window and had scrambled up and over before Cyan even had time to blink. He paused just once to look back, a stark black shadow silhouetted against the dying sunset, and Cyan almost thought he saw something like gratefulness in those burning amber eyes. Then with another bound he was off the sill and away again, back on the trail of his godhead.


	16. XVI

_

XVI

_

Relm had grown well-acquainted with blisters almost as soon as she left Thamasa, but being saddle-sore? _That _was a new and interesting experience. On the bright side, if anyone ever wanted to know what it felt like to have one's ass rubbed down with salt and set on fire, Relm would be able to help them out with no hesitation whatsoever.

It was hot. Scratch that, it was hot and _humid. _The dry heat of the desert was a pleasant memory here, across the channel somewhere in the no man's land between Figaro and Kohlingen. If she had been forced to guess Relm would have said she was closer to the latter than the former, but all the days began to mingle into one another when you were out in the wilderness like this. The passage of time was marked by the thickness of the calluses growing on the joints of her fingers from gripping the leather reins too tightly, and how far the yellow and green bruises on her butt had managed to spread. Sunburn and wind had tanned her cheeks and arms to a rosy ruddy pink, a colour Relm was fond of in sunsets and steaks but not so much anywhere else, especially on herself.

She pulled her chocobo – temporarily named Feather-Duster, since Edgar had never given Relm its real name – to a halt on a rocky little spur of land that jutted just above the tops of the evergreens. Forests like this one had begun to blanket the landscape more and more the further north they went. Even on the plains there were scrubby groves of thorny oak and mesquite, usually stunted and twisted into grotesque shapes by the wind that never seemed to stop blowing in this wild place. Travelling through these deep woods Relm could almost imagine the northern reaches were still untouched by settlers or men, but then she would hear the ringing of an axe or the warking of draft-chocobos far off, and the illusion would be shattered completely, leaving her grumpy and sullen for the rest of the day.

Even now she could see a thin ribbon of blue smoke winding its way from some cabin hidden out of sight down in the thicket. Far away to the northwest a faint, jagged line was beginning to creep up against the horizon, Relm's first sign that they were nearing the Kohlingen Range and the little township it took its name from. She felt a surge of relief and pocketed the silver compass carefully before kicking her bird onwards, back along the trail towards the darkness of the forest floor. It was stifling under all those trees, muggy and breathless and full of midges, but at least it was out of the sun. Poor Feather-Duster needed the shade; she looked somewhere between a drowned rat and a scalded chicken.

Feather-Duster didn't have the stubborn energy or personality of Bill, nor was she anywhere close to being as much of a comforting presence as Interceptor, whose absence nagged and worried away at Relm every single day and haunted her dreams at night. She was a good, fast, well-bred steed and generally did as she was commanded, but that was about the limit of her charms. Relm was so lonesome she had ceased to care; Feather-Duster got asked questions and was given more advice than any other chocobo between Figaro and Kohlingen. She also got sworn at a lot, usually for refusing to move as fast as Relm would have liked her to.

The pen had been limping for most of the afternoon and Relm couldn't tell if she had developed an actual sprain or was just playing it up for sympathy, as chocobos tended to do when worked harder than they might've liked. Just in case it was something to worry about Relm reined her in and dismounted to have a better look, poking and prodding at the joint where the scaly foot connected to the bird's leg, until Feather-Duster clucked and lashed out with her other claw in protest. Relm smacked her hard on the beak with the looped end of the reins but stepped away anyway, annoyed and slightly worried by what she had found. _Dammit, of all the stinking luck. Why does Stray feel the need to keep throwing this crap in my way? Jerk._

There didn't seem to be any noticeable injury or damage, but the hock _did_ seem a little warm. The last thing Relm wanted was a chocobo with a broken or useless leg in the middle of nowhere; the idea of having to walk the rest of the way to Kohlingen – carrying several pounds of saddle and tack, at that – was, to put it lightly, unappealing. It looked like they were stuck, at least for the night. All Relm could do was slap a poultice on the strained foot and hope things looked brighter in the morning.

"I guess you get a break after all, girl," she muttered, pulling the picket rope and driving peg out of the saddlebags with more than a little reluctance. "Don't try to fool me for a second into thinking you're really hurt, though, you big sissy. I _perfected _sticking my thermometer over the lamp. I'm the champeen queen of fake injuries."

Feather-Duster remained unimpressed and instead focused all her attention on the beakbag full of greens Relm was holding, greedy as always (remarkably she seemed to forget all about her injury when food was on the line). With plenty of additional grumbling Relm cinched the bag on securely and picketed her just across the clearing, where the grass was soft and thick. At least she'd picked a nice spot to break down in; Relm didn't even want to begin thinking of what sitting out on the shadeless plains would have been like in this weather. It was still hot and muggy as hell in the woods, and the mosquitoes were about to suck her veins dry, but at least there was shade. Out of the many, many things that had gone wrong on this journey, she could at least cling to _that. _

It was a pretty little place, a clearing not much wider across than a house, dappled with evening sunlight and surrounded in every direction by deep woods. Rotting leaf litter and grass muffled Relm's footsteps as she went to and fro, untacking Feather-Duster and making as much camp as was needed for the night. By the time she wrapped the bird's foot and managed to get her groomed and bedded down, the sun had completely disappeared behind the dark wall of trees, the entire forest slowly dimming to a blue-grey afterglow. Unfortunately it was still hot; the sweat was dripping off Relm's nose and down the back of her neck like rainwater. No need to bother with a fire, anyway. More small mercies to be thankful for, yippee.

Relm huddled on her pallet and tried to get to sleep, but the heat and the sweat and the midges wouldn't even let her come close. She lay staring up at the sky through the trees – just enough of a summer haze to blot out the stars, of course – hoping that eventually she would get tired, but nothing seemed to be happening. Instead came a hundred nagging worries, thoughts of her father and Gau and most of all Interceptor, somewhere out there underneath that same night sky, lost and alone and confused …

Camping wasn't fun anymore without him. In fact, it could be downright scary without his friendly warmth against her back, a bulwark against thieves and predators and imaginary monsters in the dark. She had always known that Interceptor wouldn't let anything get her, but now? Now she was on her own, and not at all sure of her own abilities in a pinch. Relm was brash, and Relm was bold, but when the gloomy hours descended and everything got murky she was just like any other wussy girl lost in the woods, crying for her daddy. It disgusted her that she could be so weak. _Relm's scared of the daaa-rk, Relm's scared of the daaa-rk …_

She tossed onto her side and buried her head underneath the bundle of clothing she was using for a pillow, trying to blot out the worries and the mocking voices in her head. Sleep began to slowly edge in, the dreams so tantalizingly close she could almost taste them ...

Something out in the woods broke a twig, and the noise propelled Relm upright with the lightning speed of the on-edge and newly awakened.

The noises were coming from all around the clearing, slight but just loud enough for Relm's ears to hear. She strained to see in the dim light and could only make out slipping shapes, shadows on shadows on shadows. It was impossible to tell if they were real or figments of her imagination, but the sound had certainly been genuine. Nothing else would have roused Feather-Duster into standing up and pulling nervously at her picket-line as she was doing now, clucking to herself like an oversized hen.

From frighteningly close inside the treeline came a howl, mournful and siren-like. Another rang out from the opposite end, and another, until the eerie chorus had encircled the little meadow. At other times, in other places, Relm might have enjoyed hearing this night song of Interceptor's brethren immensely. On _this_ dark evening, alone and huddled inside her blankets, Relm wanted nothing more than to burrow into the ground and hide forever. Couldn't they go practise somewhere else?

The serenade soon ended, but her lonesomeness and fear didn't let up for the rest of the night.

---

The next morning broke slowly and painfully, a creeping, sticky, unsettled grey dawn that dripped its weak light down through the tree branches. Relm woke herself up thrashing about in the blankets as she tried to ford Figaro Channel again in her dreams. It hadn't been nearly as easy a crossing as Edgar had predicted – Feather-Duster had panicked when the water reached her neck and begun to flail so badly she nearly threw her rider off into the sea – and ever since Relm had suffered from nightmares of fast-flowing rivers and rip tides that wouldn't let go. Some nights it was Figaro. Other times it was Doma Channel again, and she was trapped beneath the ice. No matter the location the dreams always ended the same, with Relm waking in a cold, sickly sweat, gasping for air. This day started no differently.

She got up and made herself some breakfast (if eating a block of pressed wheat manufactured especially for travellers could be called making breakfast; the village of Albrook had gained a reputation for baking the things, that and smelling like burnt wheat all the time), then packed her meagre belongings and checked on Feather-Duster, who had been watching all these preparations with a suspicious and wary eye. When she aimed a powerful kick at Relm with her bandaged foot, the girl decided then and there that they were good to go and cinched the saddle onto the surly bird without any further qualms about the state of her companion's health. The little clearing was soon left far behind, Feather-Duster calmly eating up the miles like she had never fallen lame before in her life.

Eventually the pine forest gave way to plains again, miles upon miles of chaparral and gorse and tawny scrub scattered underneath a dun-coloured sky. The weather left Relm nervous and unsettled; she couldn't tell exactly _why _she felt compelled to keep looking over her shoulder at the southern horizon, just that something wasn't quite right. A warm, muggy wind kept blustering in from the same direction in fitful gusts, blowing her hair into her eyes until it was almost impossible to see. She swore at the breeze and tried to push the strands back with one hand while keeping a tight rein on Feather-Duster with the other. Weren't winds supposed to cool you down? All this one was doing was annoying the hell out of her while making things feel stickier than they already did. Trying to breathe was like drawing in air through a damp, sodden sponge.

Generally, in Relm's admittedly limited experience, as the morning went on it got lighter, not darker. Today it seemed to be doing the opposite - the further they travelled the dimmer the sky became, an ominous band of blue-black cloud swirling up from the southwest to overtake them as they ran. Things grew eerily still as the line drew closer. The fitful wind died down, and every bird and beast and insect seemed to hold its breath, waiting.

Overhead the cloudbank turned from dark blue to a seething, gangrenous purple-green. Shreds and wisps of smaller vapour tore free from the main bulk of the front and scuttled ahead like unmasted ship's sails. The entire tortured mass seemed to suddenly speed up; before Relm could press Feather-Duster to a faster gait it was sitting directly on top of them, turning the world a sickly hue the colour of bile. Feather-Duster fought for her head and Relm gave it to her, hoping she could at least outdistance the storm until some shelter appeared.

It was a futile effort. Relm's chocobo was a fast bird, but nothing short of Kirin could have outraced the storm they were up against now. The downdraft caught them in a roaring burst of wind that nearly sucked the breath out of Relm's lungs, fierce and impossibly cold after the stifling humidity of the previous two days. Almost at the same time the heavens finally let loose and rain began to fall in sheets, big fat drops that struck at her head and back like handfuls of hastily thrown pebbles. It took her a moment to realize that some of them _were _pebbles – ice pebbles, hail, lots of it. Little bits of the stuff were bouncing and skipping merrily on the ground all around them, slowly turning it white.

Across the prairie, just over the horizon, there was a shaggy line of trees dipping down into an overhanging creekbed. If they could just reach it Relm figured they would be okay (and dry), but the hail was slowly getting larger and larger. It had started out pea-sized; now there were chunks the size of hen's eggs ripping the branches off trees and shrubs like icy bullets. One roughly as big as a _chocobo _egg smashed down dangerously close to Relm's head, which was all the urging she needed to quirt Feather-Duster into a flat-out run towards the safety of the sheltering clay banks.

The rain was coming down so hard now it was almost horizontal, blowing into Relm's nose and eyes. She sputtered and choked and tried to see ahead, but the landscape had turned to a watery grey-white blur beyond the end of Feather-Duster's beak. Lightning split the sky from east to west; the ear-ringing crack of thunder that pealed out with it goaded the terrified chocobo to a speed Relm would have never thought she could reach, especially on a sprained leg. They were running blind and directionless through a world of water and ice and increasingly loud booms, and she wasn't even sure they were going towards the riverbank anymore.

_I'm lost, _she thought to herself. _I'm_ _lost and I'm wet and I'm either going to be killed by lightning or giant blocks of ice falling out of the sky._

Relm began to laugh, suddenly and uproariously. She laughed so hard Feather-Duster slowed down and peered back at her curiously through the downpour, and the sight of the pen's baffled face with the rainwater dripping off her beak was so tremendously goofy Relm laughed even harder. Could anything go _more _wrong? It was so utterly fucking ridiculous she just had to let the laughter flow out. Goddesses, what a _farce. _ What a lark. The world was wild and shambolic and full of chaos, and Relm loved it with all her heart and soul.

She was still chuckling when the deluge let up enough to reveal five elegant grey shapes watching her curiously from the top of the creekbank. When she finally noticed them, her laughter cut off with an audible gasp.

Wolves. Lobos, sodden with rain and mud and yet more graciously dignified than any man-delegation Relm had ever known. They sat in a neat line, silhouetted against the sky, and they were watching Relm with all the curiosity of a group of scientists presented with an endearingly insane toddler to baby-sit. The lightning flashes glinted off their eyes; one or two stirred or shook themselves off, but for the most part they were unmoving, silent and perfectly still. If they hadn't blinked occasionally Relm might have thought they were statues or decoys of some kind, but no, they were most definitely real.

And they were watching her.

If there had ever been a good time to panic this was probably it. There was little Relm could do against five fully grown lobos on her own, even if she had been well armed and Interceptor had been at her side as defense. And yet … and yet Relm felt no fear or worry, the terrors of the night before melted by the sight of the watchers. Feather-Duster was squawking and jerking her head around frantically at the smell of so many predators, but Relm just couldn't seem to work herself up into a fright. She had fought enough monsters and evil beasts to recognize the feeling of oppressive ill-intent such types emitted, and this little pack of wolves didn't have it in the slightest. The only vibe she got from them was one of intense inquisitiveness, an overwhelming desire to understand her and what she might be thinking tinged with an almost unsettling intelligence. It was eerie, but not threatening.

Without really noticing, she raised her hand and waved to them. Five heads as one cocked and turned to watch her fingers as they curled through the air. The biggest of the lot, a massive grey male that would have dwarfed Interceptor had he been there, rose to his feet and took a few steps towards her. The feeling that he was trying to perceive the meaning of the gesture was so strong it almost took her breath away.

The alpha stared hard at her face and uplifted hand. His tail ever so slightly trembled. Then he turned away and trotted off through the belt of trees, his pack quickly following suit.

One by one they vanished into the darkness of the river-bottom, a ragged, stately procession. Relm found herself wondering how long they would be able to survive in this place, with humanity fast encroaching. How long would it be before some chocobo farmer found one of his chicks missing and slaughtered the lot with snares and poison and fire? She wished with all her might there was some way she could tell them to flee, to run away while there was still time, but this of course was impossible. The chasm between their worlds was too wide, and one day soon they would all fall into it.

She clucked to Feather-Duster and turned her to the north.


	17. XVII

_

XVII

  
_  
In the mountains to the east of Kohlingen, far back in the caves and canyons where humans seldom went, there lived a creature who had been unaffected by the changes of the world, great and small, for well over a hundred years. Occasionally he would come down from the hills to terrorize the villagers, smashing fences and killing livestock as he went, and sometimes when too many chocobo herds had been affected the men would send a hunter up into the creature's domain to try to kill him. His cave was decorated with the skulls of these hunters, scattered and smashed to bits under the weight of claws the size and thickness of railroad spikes. He did not fear man, but man feared him, him and all his kind.

Then the world changed. One by one the eldest's brethren began to sicken and die, for they were one of the breeds that relied heavily on magic and when it left the world, so too did they. In massive numbers the golden bears dropped, until the mountains that had once rung with the sound of roars became empty and silent. Their bones joined the bones of the hunters their chieftain had killed over the years, mixed and scattered until one set couldn't be told apart from another. Men said the golden bears were extinct at last, and in celebration and defiance of their old foes they built settlements closer and closer to the foot of the mountains where once they had feared to tread.

But the great golden bear, the eldest chieftain, did not die. He was so great and old and held onto life with such a stubborn persistence not even the end of magic could cease the beating of his mighty heart. The old bear was well over twelve feet tall when he stood on his hind legs, and the weight of his paws rivalled the sturdiest sledgehammer; not for _him _the quiet end, stretching out in a hidden place as life meekly and silently slipped away. As long as there was breath left within his barrel-chest, the bear would fight for it, and just to hammer this fact home one night he slipped down into the settlements and killed a good half of their chocobos, rending and destroying anything within reach before fleeing back into the mountains with the dawn. The taste of fresh blood was sweet on his tongue, and for a week the bear ventured into the valley each evening to feed, as unafraid of humans as he had ever been in his youth.

A call went out up and down the valley: the great bear had returned, and if someone did not stop him soon, every chocobo in the Kohlingen vicinity would be dead and wasted by the next full moon. There was a great hunter of monsters who lived in the village, and it was he the council sent out when the next attack occurred, although in truth none of them genuinely expected to ever see the man alive again. He had appeared three years before looking for work and had since proven to be as fine a monster-killer as you could want – there were few monsters left, but the ones that remained needed some clearing out – but not even the oldest and wisest trackers had ever come back from following the bear. It was a death sentence, but they hoped that perhaps a human sacrifice would pacify the old creature, and to this aim sent the hunter onward with words of cheerful praise.

The golden fled into the mountains with the rising sun as he always did, but this time the monster-killer followed, hot on his heels and heavily armed. It was a long chase that went deep into the bear's lair, and at the end of it the man did _not _die – a surprise to both the hunter and his quarry, who had fully expected to smash this ape's head in with a single blow just as had always happened in the past. But this ape was _fast_; he moved like a blur, and before the old one could bring his claws and teeth to bear on the stinking creature it was always somewhere else, slashing at the heavy hide with a poisoned sword and throwing knives until the golden could take no more and fled with all his speed and quickness into the highest upreaches of the mountains where men did not dare follow. The human turned and went home without his prize, apparently satisfied that his ursine adversary would die from the poisoned wounds.

He obviously did not know his opponent as well as he thought. The golden was horribly sick from his cuts, true, but he hadn't died. He staggered aimlessly through the mountains in a blind stupor, suffering but unwilling to let go of the life he had clung so tenaciously to for over a century.

His wounds dripped pus and seeped blood. One eye had been put out by a throwing knife, and there was a great gash down to the bone on one of his hind legs where infection was beginning to set in. Half of an ear had been lopped off and the shredded tissue dangled uselessly from a narrow strip of flesh no wider than a man's pinky. The bear's world was composed of pain and confusion and anger; he shuffled through it completely unaware of his surroundings. Eventually his tortured wandering took him back down into the valley, farther south than he had been wont to go when in his right senses. No men saw the golden – he had emerged from the pass in a fairly unsettled area, several miles from the outskirts of Kohlingen – and the old monster might have stumbled onward to the coast and eventually died there without ever bothering another human soul, had it not been for a warking chocobo and its rider who bumbled right into his path.

The eldest had never been equipped with superlative eyesight, even when healthy. Bears were notoriously short-sighted and this one was no different; he operated by scent and hearing, not vision. But even with one eye gone and the other in bad shape he saw the chocobo when it passed nearby, a bright dot of yellow trotting through the evening shadows towards the village. The hot smell of the rider burned the bear's nostrils and stirred the last dying embers of his hatred into a blazing fire of wrath. It was because of creatures like _this _that he hurt so badly, and it was because of them that he would most probably die. A tiny red eye full of rage settled on the galloping figure, and without warning the bear charged, his final burst of energy devoted to snuffing out the nettling smell and sound of this enemy of his tribe.

---

Relm had no idea she was under attack until the creature was almost upon them, a towering mass of muscle moving at an unbelievable rate through the twilight towards her and the chocobo steed. There was no time to react and no time to prepare; before the girl could reach for a weapon or turn her mount out of the way, the bear had slammed into them and she was flying through the air, knocked several feet away by the force of the sudden unexpected impact.

The screams of the dying chocobo and the roars of the maddened bear eventually brought her back to consciousness. It couldn't have been more than a minute since the fall, perhaps two, but in those scant moments Relm's life had come under serious threat. Feather-Duster was being ripped to bloody shreds by the golden bear and it wouldn't be long until it turned its attention to finding Relm as well; she couldn't outrun this crazed beast on foot and there was little to no chance of her fighting it one-on-one and coming out of things unscathed. Hiding would merely prolong the hunt, as bears could smell as well as any trained bloodhound – her only chance of survival rested on slipping away while it was distracted with the chocobo, moving with stealth and speed until she reached the village or an outlying settlement and could get help.

Luck was not with Relm on this day. The first step she took was right onto a dry branch, and the sound of it cracking under her foot rang out like a gun firing through the evening air. The bear's gore-smeared head shot up, as big around as three rainbarrels lashed together. Slowly and deliberately it sniffed the air and peered into the gloaming, trying to see what had made the noise with its one good eye. It left the strewn pile of intestines and reddened feathers that had been Feather-Duster and shuffled closer, until Relm could smell the musty rank odour of it, hot blood and stale breath and old old age.

Then it stood on its hind legs, each dangling forearm almost the size of a man's body, and she finally got a good look at just how big this creature was.

"… FUCK."

The bear's great head swivelled towards her hiding place and Relm realized too late that she had said it aloud. _Fuck fuck FUCK_. It dropped back to all fours and as the girl prepared to make a last-ditch effort at running it swung its head and charged the brush.

Too late.

She stumbled and fell, and as the golden loomed over her all she could think of was her mother. Then a black shape came hurtling out of the darkness and flew into the bear's face, and every thought in Relm's head was wiped clean as shock took over at what she was seeing.

Somehow, against all odds, Interceptor had found her.

They were whirling and flashing faster than the eye could follow, two wild beasts locked together in deadly warfare. The bear, for his part, was confused and unnerved by this new development; there had been a chocobo, and he had destroyed it easily, and there had been a human, and he had been well on the way to snuffing out its life as well. Then without warning this sharp-toothed wolf had come from nowhere to attack his already injured body, and things had suddenly become a lot more complicated. He would kill the wolf before it tore open his wounds any further, and then he would kill the man-creature as had been the original plan. The world would make much more sense once the wolf was dead and the human crushed between his jaws.

But it was much easier to _try_ and kill the snarling thing than it was to actually hit it. Unlike a decent opponent it wouldn't stand still long enough for the golden's raking claws to find a purchase. Instead it danced and darted and slashed and was well away before he could retaliate, a slipping shadow that never stayed in one place for long before moving onward to the next. The bear's tough old hide was soon bleeding from a dozen cuts, mostly around his neck, where the wolf seemed to focus the brunt of its attacks.

If Interceptor had merely been fighting for his own life, or to drive the creature away, it would have been a simple task of keeping his adversary occupied until either the chance to escape arose or the bear backed down and fled. As it was he was fighting for the life of the _girl. _This transformed him from an angry dog into a raging demon hell-bent on annihilating the threat to his godhead, with little to no concern for his own welfare or well-being. Once the golden caught him in the ribs with a claw-studded paw, and the blow threw him several yards through the air. Almost before the wolf-dog's body had touched the ground he was in the bear's face again, lips wrinkling back in a snarl.

The battle went on and on until the ground around the two was torn and spattered with blood. Interceptor never ceased moving and the golden began to tire, already weakened by old wounds and advanced age. It lifted its head to bellow at him and in doing so exposed a spot on its neck where the jugular vein ran perilously close to the surface. Interceptor instinctively saw his chance and lunged, but was a fraction of a second too slow - jaws that could crush steel clamped shut on the dog's pelvis and there was a loud crunch as the bear shook him about like a rag-doll. Interceptor's body went limp and still, dangling lifelessly from the bear's mouth.

His enemy vanquished, the golden tossed the insensate form to one side and once again turned his attention to the human. It was trying to get away, scrabbling helplessly in the dirt, but even wounded there was no doubt the old bear could catch up with his prey whenever he wanted. The bear rumbled a growl and limped ponderously towards the object of his fury, more determined than ever to cave this mewling thing's head in before it and its kind did him any more harm. In his dim-working mind the golden had connected all pains to this vector of man, and never had he hurt so badly as he did at that moment. He lowered his jaws and prepared to rip the hairless worm-animal limb from limb, the rank smell of it egging him on in his rage.

There was a sudden scissoring pain in one of his back legs, a hot slash like someone had struck him with a man-blade. The bear felt his leg give way as if it were made of wet timber and tried to turn to face this new threat, only to have the other leg assaulted in much the same fashion. His back end went crashing down to earth in a cloud of dust, all attempts to put weight back on the useless limbs coming to nothing. What fresh trickery was this? With an effort the golden dragged himself around, back limbs trailing ineffectually in the dirt.

Interceptor lay crumpled in the grass before the bear, gravely injured but still snarling weakly. The wolf-dog knew he was dying, could feel the bones grating together deep inside, but with his last ounce of strength he had attacked the golden's hindquarters, hamstringing the great bear before it could bring any harm to the girl. Those final slashes to the bear's legs had cost him dearly in energy and blood, but it had been worth it. The bear would never run again; with that advantage the girl could surely get away from the grave danger nature had directed at her this day. He collapsed back onto the crimson-stained ground and growled his challenge to the golden chieftain, ready to die in battle.

The bear fell upon his prone form and Interceptor knew no more.

---

Relm had been watching with mounting horror as the battle progressed. She knew Interceptor was protective, and also knew him to be a formidable fighter when pressed, but this was a bit too much to handle. He had just tackled a _bear _for her. Never in her wildest fantasies of what could possibly go wrong on this final stretch had she jotted down 'bear attack' in her mental checklist, for bears, goldens especially, were supposed to be extinct. Obviously she had been misinformed, because this one was most definitely _not_. She had no idea what to do, although the crazy notion of pulling Interceptor off and subsequently running like hell popped into her head more than a few times during her stunned observation of the fight. Running without him never crossed her mind.

Interceptor went down in a crushed heap and once again the bear turned to her. Once again she had prayed to the Goddesses, and once again Interceptor had saved her at the last moment. The bear's back legs looked right and truly fucked, not at all fit for sprinting, and Relm knew that this was as good a time as any to run for it, but try as she might she couldn't seem to move. That was her friend being ripped to shreds there on the grass, the friend that had just saved her from a horrible death. There seemed no way to save _him_ from the wrathful mountain of teeth and claws that had fallen upon his broken body, but Relm Arrowny was stubborn and had been since the day she was born. She began wracking her shell-shocked mind for a way to save him, only to come up against a brick wall at every single juncture.

Painting the bear might have worked for a moment, but this monster was far out of her solitary league and she had only thought to bring smaller brushes, nothing heavy duty. Would distracting and leading it away work? Relm had just begun to formulate a plan involving running up and yelling in the bear's face when Interceptor emitted the first noise of pain she had ever heard him make. It was a terrible screaming-yelping sound, a cry of utter anguish, and when Relm heard it her blood changed first to ice and then to fire. Red-hot fury swept over her. All thoughts of escape fled from her brain.

_Kill._

Relm's hand went to her pack. Almost of their own volition her fingers grasped the hilt of Sally MacDonald's blade, the parting gift the tough old bandit-woman had graced her with on that cold March morning so long ago. Relm had completely forgotten she had it, but her subconscious hadn't. A senseless, blind rage fell on her, and without really realizing what she was doing Relm charged the bear, who was meanwhile distracted completely with the annihilation of her dog.

When Relm thought back to this day later on, she could never remember exactly how she did what she did. From the moment her charge began the girl's mind was a blank, moving and acting on instinct and rage alone. She never remembered darting up the animal's shaggy back like a circus performer, couldn't recall what it was like to clamber towards the burly neck with only handfuls of fur to keep her aboard, and could never again evoke the memory of what exactly urged her to stab the shining blade down again and again at that particular point on the bear's spine, right where its neck connected to the skull. The spirit of the ninja overtook her body, and when she finally came to the bear was dead, the knife was buried hilt-deep between its vertebrae, and all was silent and still.

There was blood everywhere. It was in her hair and all over her hands and the copper taste of it was sharp on her tongue. She managed to tug the dagger loose from the animal's corpse and stared at it blankly for a good minute, unsure of what had happened, before it settled on her just what she had done. Her sticky fingers curled around the handle tightly.

"You … you were right, Sally," she whispered, awestruck. "It … _did _come in handy."

The shock of the attack and the smell of the bear's rank body were too much. Relm rolled onto the ground with a thud and proceeded to retch heavily into the dirt, until her eyes and nose were streaming. It hurt like hell, but the bile tang in her mouth afterwards was much preferable to the coppery aftertaste that had been there previously. She lay staring up at the night sky in a stupor for some time before the sharp memory of Interceptor screaming tore through her mind and she scrambled to her feet, terrified of what she might find but determined to look anyway.

He was half-buried underneath the bear's immense corpse, its massive forearms almost completely hiding the wolf-dog's body from view. Relm struggled to lift them away from her injured comrade; each one was three times as long and thick as her body and it took a lot of straining and sweating to pull the dead weight off by herself. When she finally managed to remove both of them and got a good look at Interceptor, another wave of nausea overtook her and once again she knelt in the grass and dry-heaved, fresh tears running down her cheeks.

Interceptor was not in good shape. His pelt was matted with blood and saliva, one eye had been put out during the battle, and both back legs were shattered, reddened messes of flesh, the bones sticking out at odd angles that nature had never intended. There were deep cuts and gashes all over the dog's body, but one, a low claw-rake across the belly, had slit his stomach open, letting the insides bulge dangerously outwards into the open air. It made Relm ill just looking at it. And when had he gotten so _thin_? What had he gone through to find her?

She sat down beside the battered body of her best friend and pulled his maimed head into her lap as best she could. Relm was not a crier, no, but this … this … there was no resisting it now. The girl wrapped her arms around Interceptor's neck and sobbed. When he somehow managed to awaken and began weakly licking at her face, she just cried harder.

He was weak, very weak, and a red film kept closing over his vision. It felt much easier to let the warm red mist close over his consciousness, but the girl was very sad and so he struggled against the pull, lifting his head as best he could to lick the tears from her cheeks. It had always made her laugh and push him away protestingly in the past, but on this night she merely pulled him closer. He did not understand but was glad for the closeness, for he hurt terribly and hoped his mistress would somehow make the hurt go away. Interceptor had been a good dog – he could hear the girl telling him so faintly, somewhere far above – and good dogs were always rewarded in the end. He laid his head back in the girl's lap and with an effort wagged his tail, showing her that he understood her words and was pleased. He had found her again, and that was all that mattered.

The red tide pulled him under, and this time he let it.


	18. XVIII

_

XVIII

_

_In the woods outside Thamasa the leaves are piled three-deep, a rich carpet of golds and crimsons and oranges that catches the slightest movement and amplifies it with a loud crunch. Not even a field mouse can move through the forest now without making a racket, but Shadow is just about as far away from a mouse as one man can possibly be, and he has no trouble at all slipping through the sylvan alarm net, his equally silent partner following faithfully along at the ninja's heels._

_It is fall, the time of harvest, and everything seems tawny. The corn on the stalk is yellow and ripe, the gourds on their vines a rich ochre – even the air seems to take on an auriferous tinge, chill though it is. When Shadow finally glides to the edge of the yard and peers over the fence, he is quite unsurprised to see that the child too is golden, a pretty flaxen-haired thing with apple-cheeks and a cheerful disposition. She must only be around four years of age – it is hard for Shadow to keep up with the passage of time; he does not live by it, as do office clerks and teachers and merchants – but the girl already so resembles her mother it quite takes his breath away. He generally does not allow himself the luxury of emotions, but once a year on this day it is acceptable, and so when the sharp pain in his heart comes he does not fight it._

_The old man is nowhere to be seen, not that he would be much of a threat even if he were around. Shadow knows that the people of the village, Magus foremost among them, believe he caused the woman's death, and on this matter he actually tends to agree. If he had never set foot in Thamasa she would still be alive, her slender figure bursting with life and merriment and kindness like Starlet herself descended from the heavens. It is yet another sin to pile onto the heap, but it torments him for his own reasons, and not because of the slack-jawed villagers and their dubious opinions._

_He pushes these dark thoughts out of his head for the time being and watches the child chase a ladybug across the lawn. Even at this young age she moves with a decidedly untoddlerlike grace, stalking the bright black-and-red beetle until it tires of the game and flies away home. Then she falls back on her bottom and cries in frustration, and Shadow can't help but smirk a little, knowing full well where this short-tempered streak comes from. Somewhere Baram must be chortling._

_Before he realizes what is happening Interceptor has cleared the picket fence in a single bound and is frantically licking the little girl's face, trying to staunch the tears with a washcloth-sized tongue. Shadow is dumbstruck at this subordination; the feral dog has always seemed to dislike the bulk of humanity – save for the woman, his original owner – but here he is playing nurseymaid to a crying babe. The girl is unafraid, for this is something much better than a ladybird, much bigger and much fuzzier. She stops crying almost immediately. _

_"Puppy!" she squeals, throwing her arms around the wolfish neck with the heedless carelessness of the very young. Interceptor looks pleased, grinning even when she tugs on his sensitive ears painfully. He almost seems to enjoy the mauling._

_It is a pretty sight, the child's angelic pink and white face pressed against the sable coat of her new friend, but Shadow cannot risk being seen for long. He hisses a command to Interceptor, but for once the dog does not obey the command. A mute, pleading stare is all Shadow gets for his pains, and with some dismay the ninja realizes if he wants his dog he's going to have to go fetch the disobedient beast back himself. For the first time in a very long while Shadow feels the beginnings of nervousness churning at the bottom of his stomach, an unwelcome emotion he thought long since banished from his psyche. This day is just full of surprises._

_With a reluctant sigh he vaults the fence, leaving his protective screen of honeysuckle and ivy behind. Interceptor looks up with a guilty wag as his master approaches, broaching no more protest when the black-clad man snaps his fingers firmly and points away from the girl. The child, on the other hand, takes this sundering from her shaggy companion less than stoically, bursting into angry tears once more. She tries to bite Shadow's leg in a blind fury, but only manages to loosen her teeth on the high leather boots the ninja wears at all times. More crying erupts._

_Shadow has not laughed in well over six years, but he laughs today, surprising both himself and the girl. Against every better judgment he picks the little firebrand up and dandles her on his knee, watching with some satisfaction as her mood switches back to sunshine. It is the first time he has ever held his daughter._

_"What's your name, girl?" he finally says, setting her back on the ground carefully. She blesses this friendly stranger with a gap-toothed smile before deigning to answer his query. Most children are frightened of his mask and gruff demeanor, but not this one. She's as bold as a young wolf pup and this pleases him, if anything can._

_"Relm," is the lisped reply. _

_An acknowledging nod. "Where's your grandpa, Relm?"_

_She looks around as if this might be a trick question, turning back to face him only when she's absolutely sure Strago isn't hiding somewhere in the bushes nearby. "Gone to fight a mons-ter," she says, obviously parroting back a phrase said to her many times before._

_Shadow fishes in his pocket for a moment and finally pulls out a shiny gold coin, stamped on one side with the king of Doma's head and on the other with the Doman crest, an eagle holding a sword in its claws. He hands the gil piece to Relm, who examines the pretty trinket with fascination._

_"When your grandpa comes back, Relm, will you give him that, and a message from me?"_

_The girl looks up at him as solemnly as she can and nods. Shadow knows there's a very real chance his message will never be delivered, but it is merely a mean whim and nothing of any importance. "Tell him I said to use it on a better babysitter next time."_

_He runs his hand over the child's golden curls in what could almost be mistaken for a caress, then swings back over the fence without a second glance, Interceptor following dutifully as always. The dog pauses at the fenceline and glances wistfully back at the girl in her arbor just once, before reluctantly disappearing into the shadow of the woods alongside his master._

_---_

  
Deep night finally fell, and with it came a myriad of constellations, whirling onwards in a stately procession that took no notice or heed of events down below on terra firma. Bismarck the star-whale came first, followed in her turn by Kirin the Great Stag and Unicorn, his lovesick pursuer. When these wheeled out of sight they were replaced by Stray – the Cat of Luck, whose winking planetary eyes could foretell fortune or ill depending on how brightly they blazed – and the Shoat, and mighty Odin, the hunter. At Odin's feet trailed Fenrir, his loyal wolf companion, who in the mythology was a protector of orphans and the weak. It was sometimes said that the constellation's Esper counterpart had sired the world's first wolves, but whether or not this tall tale was true, as so many of the world's legends had turned out to be in hindsight, none could say. 

Relm had always loved the constellations and the mythology behind them. Strago had not been idle in teaching his adopted granddaughter star-lore, and Relm, who loved a good story, had eaten his words up like apple pie. She even tried to paint them once or twice, but the lively fire and twinkle of a blazing star was a difficult thing to catch on canvas, even for a master prodigy such as herself. The girl had contented herself with merely painting the legends instead, and in this she excelled. That triple-blasted Starlet painting she had been doing for Owzer had been one of them, as ill-fortuned as _that_ had turned out.

On this evening Relm had no taste for stars or heavenly beasts. The constellations wheeled above her and she simply did not notice, trudging steadily northward with Interceptor slung heavily over her tiny shoulders. He was light, far lighter than he should have been, but even in such an emaciated state it was difficult for Relm to haul his massive weight very far. She had to stop and place him on the ground every few feet, resting a little before picking up the burden with almost superhuman determination and moving on. It took most of the night for her to reach the outskirts of Kohlingen, a journey of just under fifteen miles made in nine hours' time.

Sometimes when she stopped and sat beside Interceptor's body Relm would forget where she was, where she was going, or what had gone before. Then the dizzy spell would pass, the urgency of the situation would set in, and once again she would be off, staggering as fast as she possibly dared towards the glittering lamplight of the village.

She had to get him to a doctor, or a vet, or _something. _Relm had ripped her weather-stained cloak to shreds to fashion bandages for Interceptor's split belly and ruined legs, but he had made no sound or movement in a very long time, and this worried her. Relm had made sure to kick the corpse of the old bear several times before setting out, furious and sick with fear for her friend in equal parts. She wouldn't let him die, not for her sake.

Occasionally she would talk to the wolf-dog, trying to let him hear her voice and know that she was still there. Relm had no idea if it helped at all, but given a choice between walking silently through the cricket-chirp darkness and hearing herself talk to an unconscious dog, she would take the latter any day of the week. Hopefully there weren't any more bears. If there were she hoped they would eat her fast and get it fucking over with.

"Remember that time … you got into the smokehouse and ate up all of Grandpa's bacon? And then … you threw it all up on his Jidooran carpet? That was … awesome." Every step was a struggle and taking a breath burned her throat like fire, but she kept on talking anyway. "Stupid dog … why didn't you just … stay at home? Not worth it …None of this … worth it."

Looming shadows began to take shape in the grey pre-dawn light, houses and barns dotting the blurry landscape. Relm stopped under a tall oak, its limbs a dim nebula against the washed-out sky, and this time she didn't move for a very long turn. The boll of the tree felt warm and solid against her aching back. It wouldn't hurt to sit just for a moment, but then she would have to rise up and keep moving. Interceptor was counting on her. He had saved her, and she would save him.

A dark figure materialized in her field of vision, shaking her gently by the arm. It was still too early-morning hazy to make out any particulars of the figure's face, but from what she could see he was long-limbed and graceful, squatting casually next to her in the dirt. Relm wondered vaguely why she hadn't heard him approaching and with a guilty start realized she had fallen asleep - almost all the stars were gone and a faint glow was growing in the east, away behind the mountains. She scrambled to her feet and nearly scared the visitor out of his wits; he leapt back with such a smooth motion it seemed more feline than human.

"Might want to give me a warning before you do that next time."

The voice was terse and unmistakably male. Any other time Relm might have been wary of a strange man in the dark, but on this morning it seemed a remarkably good stroke of luck. She replied and was surprised to hear how strange her own inflection sounded now, hoarse and strained and slightly froggy.

"I … I was going to Kohlingen, and we got jumped by a bear. My dog, he's hurt, and … is there a vet nearby? A doctor?"

Already the figure was crouching over Interceptor's still form, prodding and feeling carefully with shadowy hands. When the voice came again it was grimmer than before, gentle but immovably firm.

"Kid, your dog's dead. Has been for awhile, by the feel of things."

These words didn't make sense. There was no way they were true, and so they simply did not register at all. Relm shook her head until the blood-stiffened spikes of her hair whipped back and stung her painfully in the face. Great, she'd finally found someone and they were obviously out of their head. It really was just her luck. "No, he's just hurt. It was a really big bear." She motioned to the south with one hand. "I was … we were …"

The man had produced a lighter from somewhere and was holding it over Interceptor, the better to see with. He had his back to Relm, but even in her stunned, glassy-eyed state she noticed how his shoulders stiffened when the light fell over the dog's face, the muscles bunching rock-hard underneath his shirt. A faint shudder ran through the stranger's body; if Relm hadn't known any better she would've thought he was crying. One hand ran gently over Interceptor's matted pelt.

"… Where did you get this dog?"

He really _did _sound upset. The strong, gravely voice that had addressed her before was now shaky, quivering around the edges. Something in the back of her mind suddenly clicked, putting the pieces together, but she still replied with some hesitation, unsure and cautious.

"My father gave him to me."

Silence. The man froze as if touched by the hand of Shiva. Everything seemed to slow down and stop, from the rapidly brightening sky to the wind in the oak's leaves. _Like some terribly melodramatic painting in the Jidoor opera-house_, Relm thought to herself, but she dared not break the quiet, lest the spell be broken and the world go to pieces around them. Slowly the mysterious figure rose from his haunches and turned to look at Relm, the features of his face becoming clearer and clearer as the sun approached the horizon. He bent over to look into the girl's eyes, and the visage he saw staring back at him seemed to nearly stagger the man to his foundations.

Relm heard him gasp for air like he'd been socked in the gut, and watched with growing concern as he braced his hands against his knees and fell into a half-crouch, wearily struggling to keep upright. It was a long time before he spoke again.

"… _Why_ did you—no. This isn't the place. Come on."

In one swift movement he had Interceptor's lifeless body over his own shoulders and was striding away towards the village. Relm hesitated only a moment before running to catch up with her father's long-legged strides.

---

  
Did it take minutes to arrive at Clyde's house? An hour? Two? Thinking back on it Relm could never quite remember; the rest of the walk was a blue-grey blur of grief, confusion, and conflicting emotions. The only thing she could clearly recall was the smell of crushed wet grass and Clyde's dark shape always bobbing just ahead, ramrod straight against the dawn. He did not acknowledge her existence again for the duration of their journey, never even turned his head to make sure she was keeping up with his fast pace. Relm would have been hurt, but she was already so full of pains this one failed to register on her internal scale. Let him play the ass. She could be just as arsey as her old man, as he was sure to find out soon enough. 

Walking soon became an automatic response. Relm wasn't entirely conscious, but just like breathing or blinking she reflexively continued to lift her feet, doggedly following Clyde even when everything around her seemed like a painful waking dream. She didn't notice they had arrived until the sharp jingling of keys brought her back from the brink of unconsciousness with a start, just in time to see her father gently lay Interceptor's body to one side before fumbling with a deadbolt lock set in a massive wooden door.

Home at last.

The door creaked open, spilling warmth and light out into the damp chill of the early morning. Clyde picked up his burden once more and went inside without another word, motioning for Relm to follow with a silent hand. As soon as she was inside he shut the door securely behind them and, again with the utmost gentleness, lay Interceptor on the floor, covering the dog's body with his own cloak before standing and turning to face his daughter.

His thatch of curly hair was iron grey; although unremarkable in most respects, it was the first thing she noticed about him for some reason. High cheekbones framed a stern face, tanned the deep, rich brown of mahogany by several years of working unprotected in the sun. Obviously the old ninja's hood and mask had not been donned in some time, if the sight of them hanging dust-coated from a peg in the wall hadn't been enough of a clue for her to follow.

The eyes were just the same as she remembered, though. Cool and green, but softer than they had been when last the two had met, back when Clyde was still Shadow. Relm remembered those eyes from her childhood as well, long, long ago, but _how _she recalled them was a baffling mystery, since he had left shortly after her birth, according to Strago.

Clyde stood staring at her with an inscrutable expression before turning away again, disappearing through yet another door at the end of the hallway. By now Relm knew the drill and followed him without a prompt, into what seemed to be a spacious, well-furnished living room area. There was an absolutely gargantuan fireplace with a merry blaze roaring away, a kind of wicker sofa carpeted in furs, and even a tattered bearskin rug, spread neatly before the fire. The sight of it set Relm's legs to shaking before she could stop herself, knobbly knees knocking together in a sudden rush of fear. She tried to focus on other items around the room – ninja stars nailed artfully to the walls, an oil painting of old Thamasa that seemed strangely familiar, more types of animal skin than she could identify – but the panic wormed its way into her stomach and settled there in a churning knot. The full extent of what had occurred finally hit Relm and she swayed on her feet like a punch-drunk boxer, grasping at the couch to keep from toppling over as a sudden darkness passed over her eyes. Her head felt feather-light.

Before she had a chance to fall there was a muscular pair of hands bracing her from behind, guiding her to a seat on the settee with surprising gentleness. In another moment Clyde disappeared and returned with a mug of something hot, shoving it into her hands with a gruff command. It was the first time Relm had heard him speak since their initial meeting on the road.

"Drink," he said, and Relm drank, surprisingly obedient for once. The smell of hot chocolate tickled her nose before she actually tasted the stuff - out of all the weird and terrible things she had witnessed and learned over the past seven months, the fact that Clyde 'slit his mamma's throat for a gil' Arrowny kept piping hot cocoa prepared and waiting in his kitchen had to be somewhere near the top of the Bizarre-O-Meter. Premium blend too, from the taste of it. She tried not to guzzle it down, but eventually gave up all pretences of politeness and slurped at the scalding sweet drink until there was nothing left but a ring of foam in the bottom, pausing to peer at Clyde every now and again over the sticky rim of her mug. He took no notice of her curiosity, pacing before the fire on those long, muscular legs that seemed to make up most of his body.

There was no sound but the crackling of flames and the whistling of the wind underneath the eaves for some time. When the lithe figure finally addressed Relm again it was in a hoarse, tired voice, not far above a whisper.

"… Who was it that told you, then?"

_I suppose we know where I get my tact from now. _ "Grandpa left a note for me when he died. He didn't know where you were or what you were doing. Just your name."

"Figures. Old man always _did _have it in for me. I'll bet he's laughin' his sweet arse off somewhere right now, the bastard." He said last part more to himself than to Relm, but eventually raised his eyes to glance at her again. They looked as exhausted as his voice sounded. "And you …decided to come and look for me."

It was a flat statement, not a question. She nodded.

"Any reason _why, _exactly?"

The way he asked it annoyed Relm slightly. There was no malice in the words, no sarcasm, just an honest curiosity as to why she had wanted to see her own father. Didn't the old crab have any idea about _anything_? Empathy didn't seem to be his strong point, but _jeez. _She drummed her heels against the hide-wrapped legs of the settee, unable to hide her irritation very well as usual.

"You're my father. I wanted to see you. I thought you might want to see _me_." Her nails dug into the deerskins with a barely suppressed, fast mounting anger. "And I've kinda had some _questions _building up for the past fourteen years, y'know? It's not exactly a self-esteem booster to know your dad dumped you like a sack of rotten fish on the neighbours fourteen fucking years ago for no apparent reason."

Clyde raised one eyebrow, the barest hint of a grim smirk gracing his creased features. "Well now. You've certainly got your old man's tongue, that's for damned sure. And your mother's way of cutting straight through bullshit like a katana." He sighed heavily, leaning hard against the mantelpiece for support. The ex-ninja suddenly looked very weary and very weak, braced there in the firelight. He reminded Relm of a battle-scarred old panther, ready for the fight to end so he could worry about nothing more pressing than basking his battered hide in the sun. "It's difficult to explain off-the-cuff like this--"

"--Try me."

He shot her a look and she immediately quieted down, cowed into silence by the fierceness that had suddenly flared in his eyes. There were a lot of people she could dick around with, but Relm got the feeling Clyde was _not_ one of them. Ninjas never retired, they just ran out of reasons to kill. "--It's _difficult_, but I'll do my best to explain. Listen the hell up, though, because I'm only going to say this once."

Relm listened the hell up.

"I had to go. I wanted you to live a peaceful life, and with a bandit for an old man it's doubtful you would have had that if I'd raised you. Your mamma made me promise her that you would grow up in peace if I could possibly help it. That didn't come to pass, but I did what I could to keep my word. It was … the least I could do for her." Obviously not used to talking so much at a stretch, Clyde paused for a moment, turning what looked like a gold pocketwatch over and over in his hands. He stared at the interior of the fancy timepiece for a long time before continuing. "The reaper's always been just a step behind me, and I've seen some good men and women taken in their prime. Hell, I've _taken _good men and women in their prime. I couldn't do much for you either, but I _could _give you a running headstart at keeping one step ahead of the sickle. An assassin's life is no life you want a part of, girl. Trust me on this."

This wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. Clyde wasn't supposed to _dislike _his old lifestyle. Interceptor wasn't supposed to die. They were all supposed to have a joyous reunion, and then Clyde would show her the tricks of his trade, and they would all go back to the Veldt and he would meet Sally and they would live happily ever after. Never in Relm's calculations had she taken into consideration that her _father_ might have settled down and gone soft. Dazedly she heard herself asking what he did for a living now.

"Monster-hunter. Most of them disappeared with magic, but the ones still around are tough. Pays a damn sight more than slitting people's throats, too."

Relm recalled Edgar's words, and along with them brief, flashing images of the golden bear's knife-scored hide. Of course. It figured, didn't it.

"That doesn't explain why you never ever came to see me, even after the Kefka … thing. That doesn't explain why you never sent me a card for my birthday, or dropped by to say hello, or even let me know that you were still _alive_. Fuck, we travelled together for a year and you never said a word." Numbness was giving way to anger once more. It felt good, getting it all out. "What's your excuse _there_, huh?"

Clyde's voice was more like a growl than any other Relm had ever heard. "I don't make excuses, girl. I had my own reasons. It was best for you and best for me if we stayed on our separate paths. I don't expect you to understand right now, but maybe someday you will." In a lower tone he added, more to himself than to Relm, "And it hurts to look at you. Just like her."

The last part stung something fierce, and as always when she was wounded, Relm reacted with swift, violent rage. "Hurts to _look _at me? What the fuck is_ that_ supposed to mean?" Her hands clenched into fists of their own accord. "I think I'm starting to understand now. Just because you didn't wanna get hurt you pretended I'd never existed as long as you could. You're a selfish old bastard, is what you are."

He smiled his thin smile again. "Now you're beginning to understand."

There was a soft stirring from the top of the landing. A groggy voice drifted down from somewhere out of sight, slightly accented and very feminine.

"Clyde? What's going on down there? I heard the door slam earlier, did your hunt go alri-_oh_!" The voice suddenly had a body, standing halfway down the stairs. A _woman's_ body, with curly red hair and a heart-shaped face and the shapeliest legs Relm had ever seen. The girl and the woman blinked at one another in surprised shock before Clyde spoke again, staring at Relm with what almost looked like amusement.

"I don't believe you've been introduced to my wife yet, have you? Liz, this is Relm. She's the daughter of an old friend who's passing through." His eyes were daring Relm to speak, to correct him. She said nothing at all, mouth swinging agape like an unhinged wagon tongue.

Liz, obviously too well-bred to show surprise for long, cleared the final few stairs with a grace that rivalled Clyde's and shook Relm's hand, polite but a tinge guarded. Her fingers were slim and cool, slightly rough at the tips, the nails trimmed close to the quick.

"It is very nice to meet you, Relm," she said, her voice gentle yet somehow firm. It was one hundred percent ladylike, perfectly modulated, and yet Relm could tell just by listening that here was someone who would not be pushed around lightly. "Will you be staying with us for long? You look like you've come a long way."

Relm managed to shut her mouth and tried to grasp at some semblance of politeness, despite the overwhelming feeling that she was drowning in shock. When cold reality felt like smashing a few dreams it _really_ went to town. "I—I dunno how long I'll stay," she finally muttered, her tongue doing its damndest to cleave to the roof of her mouth. It felt like she had packed her cheeks full of cotton wool. "Not too long, though."

The redhead – her _stepmother? _It was too much to think about – nodded sympathetically, obviously convinced that Relm's wan expression was due to overexhaustion. "Well, you are welcome to stay with us for as long as you need. Has Clyde given you anything to drink? Let me go fetch you some tea, you look in need of it." She gave Relm another polite smile and glanced curiously at Clyde before gliding off into the kitchen, her dressing gown trailing behind like a bride's train.

It all suddenly became clear. The hot chocolate, the way everything was so neat and straight and tidy … it was a woman's touch. Only now did Relm notice how free of dust the room was, how the books on the mantelpiece were arranged artfully in order from biggest to smallest. She didn't know how she hadn't seen it before; even the ninja stars nailed to the wall were placed in an orderly fashion. _Fuck_.

"She's a barmaid, would you believe. Reminds me of your mother."

Clyde's gruff voice cut through Relm's reverie like a hot knife through brains. When he noticed his daughter's horrified expression he merely shrugged, unabashed and unbothered. "I've been a settled man for three years. I promised myself I'd stop running, and I have. People change. Circumstances change, for better or worse. I'm not sure what you expected, but—"

_What exactly do your expect to happen if and when you find this daddy of yours?_

"… Nothing, Clyde. Nothing at all."

And with that Relm rose numbly from her seat and staggered towards the door, unwilling to stay inside this strange man's house one moment longer. If she did she feared she might shatter. Her hand was on the knob when Clyde spoke again, sharply and almost sadly.

"Relm."

She turned to face him, only to have something heavy and cool shoved bodily into her hands. Clyde's face was as unreadable as ever, but there was definitely a shakiness in his voice, something melancholic. He closed her fingers around the old pocketwatch carefully.

"Take care out there, girl," he said, finally. "Bury him deep."

Father and daughter stared at one another, their expressions inscrutable, before Relm nodded assent and stumbled through the door, slamming it behind her as she went.

---

She buried Interceptor on the crest of a hill just outside Kohlingen, underneath the flowering limbs of a massive maple tree. It took her the better part of the day to dig his grave by herself, armed with only a spade begged from a local farmer, and by the time she got halfway through there were raw, stinging blisters rising on her palms from the chafing wooden handle, and a ghostly half-moon already floated in the late afternoon sky. If Relm noticed either of these things she did not acknowledge them - everything seemed ripped apart into a million pieces, like canvas shredded by the wind. There were too many things spilling together and mixing in the girl's brain as she stabbed away at the clay, ideas muddled up so badly she could barely pick one thought apart from the next.

Ninja stars on the wall … firelight … A painting of Thamasa she had shipped off to auction at Jidoor at least a year ago … settlers, jobs, Sally, normal lives, Interceptor's blood drying brown on her fingers, new mothers with shining white teeth and ivory skin, her father a middle-aged man ready for a different kind of life …

No, not her father. The man Relm had met was not Clyde Arrowny, nor was he Shadow the mercenary. He was something else entirely, something that Relm could understand even less than a ninja or a train-robber. This Clyde was a brand-new person born in the aftermath of Kefka's destruction; whatever his daughter had expected to find, it had _not _been this. The age of adventure was as dead as magic and had been for three years - it had just taken finding Shadow here in this state to hammer the point home in Relm's ever-stubborn mind. But where did that leave her? She wasn't ready to give up on excitement and freedom, Goddesses damn it all. This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. What about _her _dreams? What about _Sally_?

She didn't cry when the shaft was finally finished and Interceptor's body lowered in, nor did she break while automatically shovelling spadefuls of dirt onto the remains of her best friend. Grief would come later, after the numbness had worn off and the true realization of what had happened managed to sink in. For now Relm was left with nothing more than a hollow, empty feeling in her middle and a small gold pocketwatch, the faded daguerreotype of a smiling, fair-haired woman with high cheekbones and a sharp nose inside it unfamiliar but strangely comforting in these moments of indecision.

Limbs hacked from the tree's lower boughs made a crude marker, which Relm managed to hammer into the ground with a rock. It wasn't much for such a loyal companion and would probably blow away in the next high wind, but it was _something_, and Interceptor deserved it more than many a human who had died.

The little chain with its ring she left hanging on one of the cross's arms. How it had gotten around Interceptor's neck Relm would never know, nor did she care to know. He deserved to keep it just as much as he deserved a marker, of that much she was certain.

When the task was finished and the mound stomped down and nothing left to do, Relm sat down next to the grave, knees drawn up firmly to her chin, and she tried to figure out where to go next. There had never been a "_and what happens after that?" _ clause in her plans; it had almost always been about finding Clyde and acting out the ridiculously idealized life of adventure she had made up inside her own head. She saw that it was ridiculous now, but that didn't stop her from wanting it. Sally MacDonald would never be her real mother and Clyde Arrowny was not the father Relm had longed for, but what about the excitement? What about danger and wildness and thrills? Was she supposed to give them up just like her dad, go get a job as a maid like those milksop idiot-girls that worked for Edgar? Just the thought of it turned her stomach.

The lights of Kohlingen lay glittering in the darkness of the valley like distant stars, twinkling and fading with a hundred shades of amber and orange and white. It was amazing how pretty the spurting yellow-blue of gaslight could look from a distance; if Relm had been in the mood for such things she would have pulled a brush from her pack and painted it right then and there. As it was she merely stared at the scene from her perch on the hill, disappointed and weary and achingly sad. She had never felt so alone, nor needed Interceptor's shaggy ruff to hold onto quite so badly. His absence was a palpable black hole at her side, like a missing limb she'd never known she had.

_Look at all those houses out there, _she thought to herself bitterly, looking out over the tear-blurred vista. _Tens of hundreds of people living in that town and I'll bet they don't ever think about having adventures, not a one of them. What a bunch of dumbasses. I don't want to turn into that …Please, Goddesses, if you're still up there somewhere, don't let me turn into that._

Oh, the things they missed. And they would never even know they had missed them, that was the _really_ sad part. The wild lands disappeared under their axes and their houses and the only thing they were thankful for was that they could toil themselves to death in the fields or the shops day after day without any bothersome surprises. Not long before Relm would have been disgusted at the idea that she had saved the world for such simple-minded morons, but now she just felt a great wash of pity. She would never be able to hold a real grudge against them again, not after seeing how her father lived these days.

Rising to her feet, she cupped both hands around her mouth and bellowed into the wind.

"HEY, DUMBASSES! YOUR LIVES ARE PASSING YOU BY! PLEASE GO OUT AND SEE THE WORLD! PLEASE?"

There was no reply from the direction of the village. Relm sighed and stepped back from the hill's slope, not quite sure why she had done it. Wasn't there _some _way to show them all? To shake things up a little?

The idea came like a lightning bolt, so sudden and illuminating she fell backwards onto the grass with a choked gasp. When other artists had talked about epiphanies before, messages or strokes of genius directly from the Goddesses, Relm had laughed hard at them and made the crazy cuckoo sign against her temple, but _this_ was enough to make her completely rethink their supposed lack of saneness. This was … was …

Oh, why the _hell_ wasn't Interceptor still here so she could tell him? She was frustrated and elated and hurting all at the same time. It was almost _worse _now, because this brilliant idea was very quickly formulating itself inside her head and there was no-one to tell, not even her best friend. The lonesomeness and excitement crashed against each other inside and nearly dashed her mind to pieces.

A tiny voice in her head said, _I'll bet Gau would think it was a good idea. _

Another said, _Screw Gau, you'll be fine by yourself. _

And the first replied with: _Yeah, but he saved your life, you could at least tell him about this. What would it hurt? _

Relm stood undecided on the brink, hovering between the city and the wilderness in the twilight. She bit her lip and glanced into the gathering darkness to the east. And then, all at once, her face fell into a small, determined smile. It was settled. Things would be okay.

She blew a final kiss to the little grave and raced down the hillside.  
_  
_

---

_  
The plains and wide open spaces of the Veldt are covered with more and more houses each year, even as the monsters and wild beasts vanish with increasing frequency. The age of adventure and magic is over; now is the time for simple things, it is said. Kefka was defeated so that we could live our lives in peace, and peace we shall__ have.  
_**  
**_There are a handful of eccentric characters who outright rebel against this point of view. Generally the good people of the towns and boroughs laugh at these oddities or outright ignore them, but there is one who refuses to be ignored, and they have honoured her with their wholesale curiosity and with a name: The Painting Ninja._

_She does not take, this slipping shadow of the night. When the people are asleep and peaceful in their beds she comes into the houses, silent as a whisper, and she gives them the most important gift of all, the gift of memory. They have nothing she would want, after all, but she has something they have lost, and knowing this the ninja returns it to them tenfold._

_Wolves drinking from streams and wild chocobo herds. The sun dappling a forest with gold and orange light. The plains before they had fences or humans, before they were split asunder. She paints wide, intricate, stunningly-rendered murals on the walls of their homes, always of the vanished wilderness, always so detailed you feel you could reach out and touch the dew on the leaves. When the first blue light of morning begins to creep through the windows she is away again, leaving only the memories behind. _

_Some are pleased to find their homes vandalized in such a tasteful manner, some are not, but none can deny the work is that of a master painter. Many try to catch the mystery artist, but no-one ever comes close. The woman is like the shadow of a ghost in a fever-dream and never makes a sound, coming or going._

_If people knew where to look they could find her. There are places on the Veldt settlers still do not venture, and some say she has connections to the Hermit of Triangle Bay, and the Wild Boy of the Plains. Bolder tongues wag that this latter figure is the ninja-girl's mate, but they are both legends, and no-one knows anything of them for certain. The stories told about these characters – around campfires, or in the smoky bustle of village pubs, or in the schoolyard, chattered back and forth like magpie gossip - are the seeds of myth, folklore for the new world. Every age needs folklore, and it is up to the Painting Ninja and the Wild Boy of the Plains and a handful of others to provide this one with its own. They are just as important in their way as the schoolmarms and the bankers and the farmers, although no-one seems to know it._

_But sometimes even legends have ties that bind. Once a year, when the summer light is stretched thin and the cicadas are at their shrillest, a long, lean figure comes to the outskirts of Kohlingen, now a busy centre of trade with connections to Figaro-On-The-Desert and a hundred other cities and ports that have sprung up along the mountains and the coasts of the Western Continent. She dresses all in black, red and black, and if you are careful and hide yourself well you might catch a glimpse of her face when at last she takes off her mask. It is a cheerful, sharp profile, with high cheekbones and a thin nose and golden curls that cascade like a waterfall when the mask and hood holding them back are finally removed. There is also a little sadness in those green-blue eyes, sadness and regret, but it is the sadness that comes with growing up, and with experience._

_She lays a little wreath of flowers at the foot of a mighty maple tree, on top of a grassy mound and underneath a weathered old marker with a tarnished chain-and-ring hanging from its slowly decaying branches. The wind should have knocked it into the dust years ago, or vandals made off with the ring, but for some reason it has stood firm and untouched. Tiny miracles such as these are the only ones left in the age of reason and the plough, but this makes them no less special. Perhaps it makes them even more so._

_The young woman stands on top of the hill until it is dark, wind whipping her curls into a frenzy. She kneels and places a slender hand on the mound, and she says only two words. The wind rips them away almost as soon as they leave her lips, but if you listen very closely you can catch them before they're gone forever._

_"Good boy."_

_Then she pulls her mask back on and once again disappears into the night._

**FIN**

**

---

**

_(I have a hefty amount of folks to thank for helping me with this monstrosity. First off, I have to give props to Stealth Noodle and Bionicfen for beta-ing all 105 pages, putting up with my constant badgering (are you sure that phrase looks alright? Are you sure Clyde__ is in-character? Are you __sure Relm could actually get away with saying the word 'hella'?), and generally being good sports about sacrificing a good amount of time and patience to help me out when they had no obligation whatsoever to. I couldn't have done it without either of you and you both deserve medals, or chocolates, or medal-chocolates. You get what I'm saying._

_There were others too, not betas, but overwhelmingly patient sorts who read the parts and told me, true or otherwise, that __no it didn't suck horribly and __yes you should submit it to the contest. DK, Guardian1, Themis56, Zachere, Seventhe, Alek, Jenneh, Myshu, and anyone else I tormented but have forgotten about, you were all very kind troopers and I love you all dearly for not ripping my head off and shoving it up my rear after the bazillionth time I complained about my shit sucking. Gracias. And of course I can't end this thing without thanking the judges, shameless as that may seem._

_This thing took __two months to write. It absorbed a good deal of my summer and I ended up liking Relm a hell of a lot more than I did before I began on the tale. I think I'd like to write more with her, someday. In the meanwhile, thank you if you felt compelled to leave a review – we all live and feed off those things, of course, and I'm as guilty of frantically refreshing the Stats section as anyone – and if you didn't, well, I hope you still enjoyed my poorly-written, lumbering little golem-monster at least a little. If it brightened up one person's day, or touched someone a wee bit, that makes all the hours put into it worthwhile._

_Thanks, everybody.)_


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